


clink clank clKKSSSSSSTHnk [Fics That Pass In the Night]

by gisho



Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crossover, Ficlet Collection, Girl Genius Event Week 2019 (Fics That Pass In The Night), Groundhog Day (Not AU), Pre-canon character backstories, Space Exploration, Theolgical discussion, Time Travel, Unfinished Drafts, Warning: Canon-Typical Violence, speculative post-canon setting, warning: canon-typical body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-11-26 20:18:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 25,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20936150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gisho/pseuds/gisho
Summary: Unfinished/unifinshable works and other flotsam, for Girl Genius Event Week 2019.1: Later scenes from 'Hundred Years, Hundred More', currently on hold for fear of jossing.2: Gkika and Klaus talk about the Jägers' reputation.3: How Brother Mattias joined the Corbettites.4: Two diplomats have tea and a chat.5: Tarvek tries to set right what once went wrong, and has to provide his own groundhog.6: Dingbots in SPAAAAACE! (Or at least heading there.)7: Crossover with 'Narbonic'. Helen Narbon does a delicate job for the Heterodynes.8: A failed attempt at Tarvek and Gil working some more things out.





	1. The fic that requires too much backstory | Hundred Years, Hundred More

#### Oct. 7: The fic that requires too much backstory and I just want to write the one cool scene | Hundred Years, Hundred More

[Cheating a little with this one; the fic is already partly written and posted and I do plan to finish it. Someday. When I no longer fear jossing. [Go read it,](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5718565?show_comments=true&view_full_work=true#comments) then imagine more dramatic adventures in Castle Heterodyne, in the course of which Gil catches up to them. And then:]

\--

"Gilgamesh Wulfenbach." Tarvek's voice was flat and cold and slightly contemptuous.

Amazingly enough, Gil grinned. "That's right. Should I have brought my card?"

"If Lady Heterodyne believes you're real, that's sufficient." From the way Tarvek's eyes were narrowed he wasn't completely convinced.

Agatha looked sideways at the fountain. It looked as if it had been hastily remodeled by a prude, from the specific places the marble was chipped. Overhead the light trickled in through pink glass. At least the Castle wasn't making any remarks; she had terrified it into submission. Library, then repairs, then public announcement. Find Zeetha and Theo on the way, if possible. Then things were going to explode. Three days ago she'd been stepping on stage in Sturmhalten with no plans at all to conquer the continent.

She was still wavering on that point. But. Get herself declared Heterodyne first, and negotiate from a position of strength.

"Ah, Miss Cl - Lady Heterodyne?" Gil's grin was still firmly in place. "Could you tell this conniving snake that, yes, I really am who I claim to be?"

There must be history there. Agatha wondered how they knew each other; Sleipnir had said Gil wasn't _revealed_ as the Baron's heir until he finished university, so maybe they went to the same one? But she wasn't here to worry about whatever bad blood they had. She had a castle to fix. "Yes, he really is Gilgamesh Wulfenbach," she said. "I met him on Castle Wulfenbach. And we are going to have to talk about him barging in to my castle like this -" Gil stiffened - "but if you can't work with him you can just walk out of here, alright?"

"Fine." Tarvek looked like he wanted to throw his hands in the air in despair, except it would jostle his ribs. 

For some reason Sleipnir was looking back and forth between them. She pursed her lips. She took a deep breath, but what she said was, "The library is this way, right? Past the conservatory?"

\--

[More adventures. Agatha and crew get to the library and work out where repairs need to be made; Zeetha and Theo find a group of prisoners who sensibly ran away, led by Sanaa, and recruit them to help. Tiktoffen tries to finish Fra Pelagatti's Lion, but as soon as he has most of the pieces together Mittelmind stabs him, on the basis that a true Heterodyne heir turning up commutes their sentences and also that Tiktoffen is starting to worry him. 

A Questor turns up in Mechanicsburg, figures out they're being given the runaround and tries to find Vanamonde, and Vanamonde has them snatched and thrown in a cellar. Von Pinn tries to leave Castle Wulfenbach for Mechanicsburg; she's intercepted by Higgs. They fight, then compare stories, then agree to work together to get to Mechanicsburg and report to Gkika _first_ once they get there. In Vienna, Violetta, Wooster, and Lars try to work out what the Knights of Jove are up to. 

Moloch has gotten so lost he's wandered into the secret passages; Agatha and crew catch up to him on their way to repair the Great Movement Chamber waterwheel, which the Castle has reluctantly admitted exists. They debate ways to reintegrate the Castle and work out something clever whose details I havn't settled yet. Do that. Fix the rest of the Castle and leave Tiktoffen in an oubliette. 

Agatha does her triumphant exit from the Castle and is proclaimed The Heterodyne. Just in time, because the Geisterdamen have turned up in force to lay siege to Mechanicsburg.

To which news Gil responds with:]

\--

"I should have known," Gil said, and slammed Tarvek against the wall. The wall shook. Vanamonde sucked in a gasp. Agatha found herself darting forward to - defend Tarvek's honor? No, she didn't think Gil would really kill Tarvek, better not to put herself in the way. "You were just waiting for your chance, weren't you."

"Why do you -" Tarvek was twisting in his grip, but he didn't seem quite able to wiggle out - "think this is my fault?"

"Because you were mixed up with them from the start, and - ow!" He jumped back, glaring at the furious cat that had just dragged its claws down his leg. "This isn't your business."

"Yes it is, pal!" Krosp roared, and then stopped, tail lashing. Apparently he hadn't worked out how. "What's your problem, anyway?"

Agatha would like to know that, too, but right now she'd like Gil to stop threatening someone who, even if he obviously has his own agenda, is their best source of information on the immediate threat. She coughs. "Yes. Good question. What exactly do you have against Tarvek, and can it wait until we're not _under siege_?" She doesn't try not to yell. This deserves yelling. 

Gil dusts himself off. "I don't have anything against Tarvek," he says. "Well, nothing much. In fact I quite liked him. Which is why I want to know," and he interrupt's Tarvek's attempts to straighten out his clothes with another lunge-and-grab that Krosp is too startled to stop, "_who are you?_"

In the unpleasant silence that follows Vanamonde volunteers, "Er, isn't he Prince Sturmvoraus?" 

"Maybe so," Gil says. "I didn't want to think anyone could do that to their own son. But Tarvek would have recognized me. That's not Tarvek in there." 

What in the nine hells does he mean by that? 

Tarvek makes a strangled little noise and for a second Agatha thinks he's going to start crying, but then it resolves into laughter. It only sounds a little hysterical. Gil blinks a few times, confused out of his rage. He gives Tarvek an exploratory shake, and then he stumbles back with an undignified noise as Tarvek knees him in the groin. 

It's Tarvek's turn to brush himself off. "I should have known he had a hole card," he says, mostly to himself, and then louder: "Aaronev Wilhelm Sturmvoraus is dead. I stabbed him and threw him into a vat of acid, and no, he didn't transfer his mind anywhere first. He could never get his holy lady's machines working that well. Besides, Tarvek wouldn't have let him. If you were his friend, you should know he wasn't half as useless as he looked. Now can we get back to the siege?" 

Wait? What? Why is Tarvek talking about himself in third person? 

Agatha takes a deep breath. Now is very much not the time. "I don't care who you are," she yells. "You're a Spark, you're not trying to kill me, will you come help me kill the Ghost Ladies?" 

If Gil has anything to say to that, it doesn't make it out before Zeetha sticks her hand over his mouth. "Good priorities," she says, grin maybe a little too bright. "Now, what was that you were saying about atmospheric ionizers?" 

\--

[More action scenes. Somehow the subject doesn't come up again for two very tiring days, except at one point, Agatha stumbling over the name 'Tarvek' and getting an answer of, 'Keep saying that name. I'm used to it now.' 

And then Martellus shows up through the Red Cathedral door. Agatha decides to treat his offer of aid as a threat and has him thrown in a cellar until the siege is over, but his Knights show up in giant clanks regardless. By now the Wulfenbach Empire has turned up with firepower. The Geisterdamen beat a hasty retreat.

Agatha decides to follow them back to their base, in hopes of figuring out what the hell is going on / rescuing Tinka and Pix? She has the whole Jaegerhorde now! The Jaegerhorde love this idea! Gil and 'Tarvek' insist on coming along, she obviously needs the backup, 'Tarvek' speaks their language and Gil can keep his father from doing anything too stupid.

At this point the story goes places I can't map out until the comic is finished. They probably start, not end, in the Silver City, and something happens there that results in the main characters fleeing to England and basically running the canon plot backwards, but I don't have anything like details. 

The topic of So Who Are You If You're Not Tarvek somehow doesn't come up again for most of the plot, if only because of interruptions. But somewhere toward the end, in a tense moment: ] 

"I don't know why you expect me to trust you," Gil mutters. "We don't even know who you are." 

"Tarvek Sturmvoraus."

"Really?" 

"For all practical purposes." He runs a hand through his hair. It's a mess; they may not be being attacked _right now_ but the last week has not included nearly enough baths. Agatha fiddles with the buckle on her corset, still splashed with green goo. "Maybe not for legal purposes by Fifty Families rules, they decided after that business with the Count du Quay that mind transfer is treated as the death of both parties for inheritance purposes, but given whose son you are I don't see why you would care about what the Fifty Families think. Might makes right, isn't that your father's philosophy? And there, I've trusted you with ammunition against me. You might try reciprocating." 

Ammunition. Yes. That was a good idea, the charge on the invisibility door would only hold out so long. She needed an _energy source_ and there was so much _lovely_ stuff in this lab. Still listening to them bicker with only half her mind, Agatha began opening cabinets, waiting for the perfect shape to form itself in the back of her mind. 

"Inheritance? Is that why you murdered my friend, because you wanted Sturmhalten?" 

"No." A contemptuous snort. "Don't get so righteous over it. You can't have been very good friends. He never even mentioned you existed." 

"As if friendship were the only reason to get upset about _overwriting someone's mind -_" 

Oooh, they have a _Velpier switch array_ in the back there behind the _useless ceramic resistors_. Why they _have_ that Agatha has _no idea_, but already the _shape_ in her mind is _reconfiguring itself_.

"Do you have any idea what's really going on here?" Tarvek hisses. "You have no idea what I went thorough! You don't know what was at stake!" 

"Of course not! Because you _won't tell me!_" 

They're trading glares, Agatha notes distantly as her hands twist the wires into shape, like they're not sure whether to kiss or punch each other. 

Gil takes a deep breath and goes on, "You're too useful to get rid of. You know about the Geisterdamen and you understand the Other's machinery and it's not like I'm going to have you thrown in prison as soon as we get back. I notice you didn't tell me anything that was actual _proof_ if you just decided to clam up and pretend you're really Tarvek for the rest of your life. But you can't expect me to just forget that whoever you are, you _overwrote someone's mind_ for some selfish reason of your own."

"It wasn't," Tarvek says, and then the rest of the sentence catches in his throat. 

Gil plows on. "I don't know how you did it, he always had some scheme to get himself out of whatever mess we landed it, maybe you did it after his sister died and he was too upset to be careful -"

"_It was his idea!_" 

"What?"

Tarvek is clutching at his wounded ribs; Agatha reaches past him for the two-ninths Heppler wrench and he winces at the jostling. "Tarvek's idea," he repeats, and there's something strange and cold in his voice. "He was always sentimental. I don't know if he just meant us to share or if he knew the stronger personality would displace his, but he set it all up just like the Lady's old notes said, and he pulled the switch. I've spent three years pretending to be Tarvek. I'll go on pretending for the rest of my life. _Someone_ should claim his birthright."

Gil's voice, when he finally speaks again, is incredulous. "Anevka?"

"Congratulations. You have more brains than anyone withing seven degrees of blood of me."

"Who's Anevka?" Agatha throws in. She can't really _pay attention_ to the conversation, she's _almost done_, just slip the _resonator_ into place and _twist the anticapacitive helix_. 

Tarvek tells her, "I used to be." His voice is strained, like he's holding back tears. 

"His sister. The one who died three years ago." Gil doesn't quite sound like he believes it. 

That gets a contemptuous sniff from - well, he said _used to be_, so they might as well keep calling him Tarvek. Her? It can't have been comfortable spending three years in a man's body. Well, sort that out when they're not _hiding out in a barricaded lab waiting to be attacked._ Tarvek. Who tells them, "Reports of my death were somewhat exaggerated."

"That selfish fop _died_ for you?" Gil's edging toward fugue too, Agatha can hear it in his voice. Good, she still has _lots of parts_. 

"That selfish fop," Anevka says, "knew I could take the throne that was rightfully his. Besides, he's not properly dead. I can still hear his voice sometimes."

"Oh. Good. We can get you out, then."

It's Tarvek's turn to go, "What?"

"When we're out of here, obviously." Gil waves a hand. "We'll build you a body, that's not difficult, it can even be a whole body if you don't mind wearing a condemned criminal. Why Tarvek didn't do that instead of taking stupid risks - well, he was always better with mechanisms."

"My brother could never take the Lightning Crown alone. Especially not now. You wouldn't shoot yourself in the foot like that." There was still something breathy and incredulous in Tarvek's voice.

"_No one_ is getting the Lightning Crown! It's an obsolete anachronism and most of the old empire is Wulfenbach land anyway!"

"Just because you think waving a deathray around entitles you to rule Europa doesn't mean the rest of Europa thinks the same way! Do you know absolutely _nothing_ about the power of stories?"

"I know they don't stand up to people waving deathrays at them," Gil growls.

Agatha can't help but roll her eyes. "Quiet, you two," she tells them. "Someone's coming. Get behind me."

From the dirty looks they exchange as they scramble under the bench, the topic is not dead. She's going to have to conquer Europa herself just to stop them bickering, isn't she? She takes careful aim at the door, readying herself to have the element of surprise. The steps are getting closer. _Almost there_. If she fires _right now_ she can _surprise_ them without actually _killing_ them which is _important_ because she has _so many questions_ and her finger tightens on the trigger. 

The door they're hiding behind vanishes in a glowing burst of smoke.

But the silhouette behind the cloud of smoke is Zeetha, holding up the lightning stick and grinning. "Hey, guys," she says. "I found the lantern." 

\--

[Meanwhile in Vienna ... 

No, really. I'll work it all out once the webcomic is done.] 

\--

[But, eventually, there's this very self-indulgent scene.]

"Tarvek," Gil repeats. He doesn't want to be terrifying right now. This would be so much easier if he knew what he was doing. "It is you, right?"

"Who were you expecting?"

Just out three-and-a-half years trapped in the back of his own skull and still sarcastic. "Anevka," Gil said. "Prove it. Tell me something she wouldn't know."

"You don't know what I put in my letters home."

"Judging from her reaction, you didn't even mention I was in Paris."

"No," Tarvek answers. "Would you really have wanted me to tell all my relatives about the time you fell in Professor Rheimicore's slime vat and left a glowing trail of hemivalves all the way back to the Rue Sulfureux? I think it's for the best I was discreet."

"Fine. You're you." He'd been reasonably sure Tarvek had snuck away cleanly from that particular mess. 

Tarvek tugs on the cuffs, scowling. "Can I get out of this chair yet?"

"Not for five more minutes. I need to be sure the galvanic isolation is functioning properly."

"Galvanic - You didn't hurt her, did you?" He's struggling, but getting nowhere; Gil used all the straps. "You -"

"She's fine!" Gil waves his hands in the air. Tarvek still looks skeptical. "Well. Will be fine. I put her in a clank head. Just while we find a new body." 

"You could have waited."

"I wanted to be sure you were still there. If you weren't we might as well have let Anevka keep this body."

He thinks Tarvek's relaxing a little, but it's hard to tell. "Where is she? I want to talk to her."

There's a burst of static from the clank head. Gil hurries over to fiddle with the voicebox tuning. He should have waited until Agatha had a day free to help, but - It takes most of two minutes and some very odd noises, but they resolve into the chant of "-on. On. On-" that Gil had asked her for, and then a sharp, "Better. Not much of a voicebox."

"I'm sure your brother can build you a better one."

"Absolutely," Tarvek says, sounding stricken. "I'll build you a whole clank body."

"If Gilgamesh keeps his promise you won't have time, brother dear."

Gil checks the elanometer. It's steadily dropping, the high-energy side effects of the transfer procedure bleeding off harmlessly into the atmosphere. "That was the deal we made," he says absently, and wrenches the antenna thirty degrees left, toward the window, just in case of extinction burst. "Or did you hear that?"

"I don't hear everything." Tarvek just sounds tired. 

The crackling noise Anevka makes is something like a snort. "Didn't. Watch your tenses."

"Just because you've controlled my every move for the last three years doesn't mean you should be trying now, Anevka."

It takes so long for Anevka to answer that Gil is about to check her power supply - if it's cut off now she should just go dormant, no damage done, but it shouldn't be cutting off now - but finally she does. "I owe you," is what she says. It sounds like the words are being dragged out of her. "What you did was incredibly stupid."

Tarvek says, oddly flat, "There was an eighty-five percent chance I would survive the transfer process, which was better than my chances of getting the Lightning Crown if Father went completely uncoiled. I needed him sane."

Gil bursts out, "And giving up the Lightning Crown to save your skin wasn't an option?"

"No." Tarvek blinks at him. 

Anevka puts in, "You would much rather have him on the throne than Martellus, I assure you. He won't stab you in the back."

Tarvek is slumping over against the straps. Gil sneaks another glance at the elanometer. Maybe a minute more. "Maybe I should just give you the body back if you're going to be so political. How far did you get with the Heterodyne Girl?"

"The day after she agreed to marry us she went off to do the weasel war dance with that darling dark-haired actor." Why was she using Mechanicsburg slang? "And yesterday she said she would rather be Queen _Regnant_ of Europa. Understandably. I think there would need to be ... renegotiation." Another burst of static, trailing off like a wistful sigh. "She's amazing."

Yes, she is, and Gil is reasonably sure the only way she'd have him now is on a leash. They could have built such amazing things together. And maybe they still will, from opposite sides of a kilometer of sky, and maybe she'll suffer him to visit from time to time. They should talk. For a very long time. 

What the hell, he was always destined for a political marriage. 

Gil tries to straighten his collar and shift his shoulders back, a little more Baron than mechanic. "Would you rather marry me? Once you have a new body."

Anevka's clank eyes are painted on, so she can't blink in confusion. 

"My father would approve," Gil hurries onward. "It would strengthen relations with the Fifty Families. And obviously you've lost your blood titles, everyone knows you were dead, but there's precedent for getting new ones post mortem." Sort of. The Grand Duchess of Monaco had named a known resurrectee Lord of the East Admirality, which was more a cabinet ministry than a noble title, but what good was having an empire if you couldn't make people say what you wanted? 

"So why are you making such a generous offer to someone you don't trust?"

"Keeping my enemies close?" 

"Oh, you're good."

Tarvek is laughing under his breath, choking back the noise. He's shaking, too, and Gil glances at the meters - no, there's no resonant feedback, why would he be - oh. Nerves. That happens to people after stressful situations, right. The elanometer's back to background levels, so he starts undoing the straps with one hand and presses the other to Tarvek's shoulder. "Think about it," he throws out, glancing sideways at Anevka. "You don't have to answer right away." 

"Alright." A pause. "I would like to speak to my brother alone."

"Fine. In a minute." Gil grabs Tarvek under the arms to haul him out of the chair, since he's still sitting there like a sack of flour, and actually gets him all the way upright before Tarvek stomps on his foot. He yelps and steps back - it didn't hurt much, bare feet on boots, but it's the principle of the thing. 

Tarvek scowls at him. "I can stand up by myself. I'm not an invalid."

_Well, you weren't acting like you could,_ Gil should say. Or, _Of course, who'd ever have proprioception problems just because their senses have been cut off for three years?_ What he says instead is, "You're my friend. I'm allowed to worry about you."

"You weren't acting very friendly the last time I saw you." The scowl is slowly transmuting into a skeptical look. 

"Extenuating circumstances." That's close enough to true. The sixteen months they were both in Paris, Tarvek seemed to make a habit of getting in his way, always turning up to distract Gil while he was disassembling a dangerous clank or stand in the way of a monster stampede Gil was trying to herd or prance about and make someone he was investigating suspicious enough to leave town. Maybe now they're on the same side - if they are, if Gil hasn't just gone to considerable trouble to resurrect an enemy, but he hopes Tarvek will hold to the promises his sister made to Agatha in his name - maybe now Tarvek will have a good explanation. "Can we give it another try?"

He was expecting a terse nod. He gets arms wrapped around him so fast he tenses for an attack, and Tarvek's face buried in his shoulder. "You blasted heroic idiot," he says, or something like that, muffled in Gil's shirt.  
Tentatively, Gil pats him on the back. "Was that a yes?"

"Yes." And with equal suddenness the arms are gone, and Tarvek is on his knees in front of the table where Anevka's head sits. Putting them eye to eye. "Don't go far," he says sideways to Gil. "If you want me as Storm King we need to work out what to do about Cousin Martellus."

"Er," Gil says.

Anevka can't smirk right now, but clearly she would be if she had moving lips. "Oh, brother dear, I _don't_ think he'll be an issue. I have _so much_ to tell you -"

\--


	2. Oct. 8: Rarepair | All's Fair In Love And War

#### Oct. 8: The rarepair ship | All's Fair In Love And War

"Und vat did zey do instead?" Gkika's voice had something of the strained patience of a mother of toddlers, which Klaus supposed was a good enough description for the Quartermaster General of the Jägerhorde. 

He took a gulp of beer for effect before he answered. "Went out through the window, what do you think?"

In the rickety chair on the opposite side of the table Oggie rocked back until he could plant his feet on its edge, clutching his ribs as he laughed. He was the only one still awake; André and the other two of his little green gang were piled in a snoring heap in the corner, and General Zod had wandered off muttering something about artillery. It gave Klaus a certain smug feeling to think he'd finally found a distillation that worked on Jägers. Gkika, who he'd warned and who was drinking one part of his new brew to twelve parts mineral water, rolled her eyes. 

Klaus went on, "And what do you think I heard not five seconds later? A scream out the window. I thought they must have landed in the nettles and I was running around throwing open cabinets looking for a medicine kit while Lord Azavda was still doing his deathtrap rant, because I figured I had twenty seconds left - you know how those conqueror types are." Gkika nodded. Oggie nodded so vigorously he was in danger of tipping over his chair. "And then, I hear Bill's voice."

"Not so much vit de screaming in pain?"

"No. He's saying, 'I'm so sorry, miss! I didn't land on you on purpose!'" Klaus took another drink, because he needed to catch his breath. He'd begged off his own creation on the excuse of a human metabolism, but enough tankards of Gkika's ale were nothing to shrug off. "Apparently Azavada hadn't been making it up about the daughter."

Oggie nodded sagely. "Dere's always a daughter," he said, and very gently fell over backwards, landing on the floor with a thud. 

Someone ought to make sure he hadn't cracked his head, Klaus thought, but by the time he'd stood up to circle the table Gkika was already there, feeling the back of his skull. Klaus went over anyway, and then stood there feeling awkward while Gkika efficiently checked Oggie's pulse, then pulled his eye open to check for pupil dialation. He had the vague impression the horrible carven faces over the doors were smirking, but by now Klaus had spent enough time in Castle Heterodyne to ignore that sort of thing.

Right now Bill and Barry were comfortably asleep in their mother's house, four streets away, where nothing talked and if you wanted light at two in the morning you had to get up and fiddle with the gas valve yourself instead of barking, "Light!" and watching them all turn up by themselves. But Gkika liked the Castle.

After a few seconds, apparently satisfied, she stood up. "He'll be no stupider den he vas," she declared. "Help me get him to de couch?"

It was hard not to have a soft spot for Oggie. She wouldn't have bothered for most of her brothers. Klaus sighed, and went to untangle Oggie's oversized feet from the chair.

They got him settled, and then they stood at opposite ends of the couch for a few awkward seconds until Klaus decided to break it. He held out a hand. "You want to hear the rest of the story right now or -"

"Hy tink Hy ken guess, sveetheart," Gkika informed him with a very fanged grin, and then, very suddenly, turned her skin warm pink. "But mebbe you tell me in the morning und my brudders get to keep guessing? Dere's a nice big bed vit a feather mattress tree doors down."

"Lead the way," Klaus said. It was sometime past two in the morning, he had nowhere to be tomorrow - later today - and he'd just about worked out how to involuntarily turn Gkika mauve last time. Maybe he could get two sucessful experiments out of the night.

\--

"Iz vat dey vant," Gkika said, into the fuzzy grey nothingness of a rainy midmorning, her elbows perched on the windowsill. "Ve serve de House of Heterodyne. Ve iz not required to like it."

"Like serving, or like the House of Heterodyne?" 

"Hah! Good vun." But Gkika didn't answer, just kept staring. Her teal hair was still hanging loose around her shoulders, and her skin had gone the same shade, like a futile attempt at camoflauge.

Klaus sat up against the headboard, pulling the blankets up with him. Castle Heterodyne tended to the cold and damp, and even when the windows were shut they leaked. He suspected the damn place did it for _atmosphere_. "They have a point about your reputation. Bill and Barry look just like ordinary humans. You ... don't."

"Ve iz monsters, hyu mean." She snorted and turned a billious green, even as she turned away from the window. "Hyu dun hev to use euphemisms vit me, sveetheart."

"I'm trying to be diplomatic." He should probably know better by now. The Jägerkin knew exactly what they were. "Most of Europa has bad memories of you. Everyone who sees Jägers would be too busy running away to even tell Bill and Barry what they needed saving from."

"Hyu didn't run away."

"I'm not everyone." Klaus rolled his eyes and gestured down his body at the scars.

Gkika chuckled and pounced back onto the bed, landing beside him with a thump. She was back to matching her hair. "So, hyu tink it vud be hypocritical? Or hyu is jest too mad to care? Iz not like ve dun scare odder constructs. Like hyu sed. Lots uv people hev bad memories. Ve raided half de towns between here und Paris, jest about."

That was an exaggeration. Even at its peak the Heterodyne's empire hadn't gotten further west than Vienna, although what it would have done if Andronicus Valois hadn't tried to stop it was anyone's guess. Bludtharst had been unusually ambitious. 

Klaus stretched out an arm to trace the point of Gkika's ear. "You don't scare me," he said. "If you hurt me, Bill would be so very dissapointed in you. And I wouldn't tell you about their adventures anymore, and you would get bored, cooped up in here, wouldn't you? When was the last time you went raiding?"

" ... vit Saturn. Tventy-five years ago." Her claws were ripping tiny holes in the blanket. "Dere iz littul kiddies in town right now who not only never seen a loot wagon, but dere parents never did eider und dey tink iz just a funny story dere granpa tells. Hyu know vat I saw in Sanguine Square yesterday?"

"What?" 

"Tourists!" Gkika threw up her hands. "Tree men who came up all de way from Bucharest jest to look at tings. Dey'd been to de Red Cathedral und de Armor Museum und dey vanted to know if dere was tours of de caverns. Dey asked me for _directions_."

Bill would laugh his head off hearing about that. "Und v - and what did you tell them?" Dammit, he had to break that habit, someday someone was going to take mirroring for mockery.

"Nutting. Hy jest smiled -" she gave a fanged grin to demonstrate - "und dey screamed und run off. Funny ting."

"They can't have been paying much attention to the Red Cathedral, then."

"Hy know! Dey sed it vas pretty. Ve are not pretty, ve are _Mechanicsburg_." She crossed her arms. Klaus knew better than to call the way her nose wrinkled cute. This was serious. "But ve are not pretty enough to go vit our masters und try to help people. Ve tried to be sneaky vit de helping, und Master Bill still sent us home. Nobody cares if dey get help from humans even if de humans vas evil. Doctor Rediburn, thanks for de spare deathrays. Miz Mongfish, welcome to come vit uz." Gkika's eyes narrowed. "Und hyu hev no problems vit Miz Mongfish, do hyu?"

Klaus could only spread his hands. He liked Lucrezia, even if he couldn't quite trust her. It would be futile to argue that he was trying to keep an eye on her. And Gkika had a point; even if the Jägers wanted to be accepted, vowed to change their ways, they would have a harder time of it than any human. There was that instictive flinch to overcome.

The light flooding in was turning that funny shade of yellow that presaged a thunderstorm. Time to run and hook up the _élan vital_ conductors, in a town less attuned to madness, but in Mechanicsburg there was plenty of power and a thunderstorm was an excuse to go spend all afternoon in the library. Bill and Barry would turn up eventually. 

"You have a lot more history to overcome than Lucrezia Mongfish," Klaus finally settled for. "The Mongfishes have been causing trouble for fifty years. The Jägers have been nightmares for nine centuries."

"So ve have to ketch up first, hyu is saying?"

"Something like that." Klaus sighed. "And twenty-five years isn't enough to let people forget. Just keep quiet for another generation, maybe."

He wasn't equipped to give job counseling to Jägers, dammit. He was too close to - the situation.

Gkika had crossed her arms again, skin turning a sulky grey and ears twitching, and for a second Klaus was afraid even that advice had been too much for someone so unsubtle. But then her skin went red as if she had splashed paint on it and she grinned, broad and as friendly as a Jäger grin got. "Hy feel loud right now," she announced. "Hy feel like Hy could eat a horse. Hyu hungry?"

"I could probably eat a few waffles," Klaus allowed, and looked around to figure out where his pants had gotten to. Oh. Lamp. Amazing they hadn't caught on fire. "And tea would be good. Any idea where the kitchen's wandered off to?"

\--

The next time Klaus saw Gkika, he was a husband and father, it was almost twenty-five more years later, and the rest of the Jägers - with some exceptions he really should have paid more attention to - had been taking his orders for fourteen of them. Klaus had wondered, sometimes, where Gkika had gotten to. The bar he had heard about had seemed like a tasteless joke. A mistake not to investigate further. So many mistakes he couldn't afford. 

Losing Mechanicsburg wasn't about to be one of them.

"I surrender," he said, even as Gkika snarled, too angry to change colour. Somehow, despite everything, she respected him enough not to stab on sight. 

But it didn't matter, the timer was set and he tossed it in the air while the Jägergeneral made a futile leap. Three two one ze-

\--


	3. Oct. 9: minor charcters | All Men Are Brothers

#### Oct. 9: The incredibly minor character | All Men Are Brothers

[Warning: makes light of Catholic religious convictions, in a low-key way.]

"So I've been doing some reading," Mattias said brightly. 

Brother Phillipos bit back a groan as he set down the new brake shoe. That never boded well. There were plenty of boys who hung around the Corbettite's East Paris repair yard, and for the most part they encouraged it - that was how they got more Corbettites - but Mattias took the irritating questions to a new level. "And what were you reading, child?"

"The Manual of Saint Corbet and the monastic vows." Mattias produced them from under his threadbare canvas jacket. It was the edition with the green paper covers, that they sold in their gift shop for the benefit of curious travelers, right next to the cheap muslin ITE ANIMOSE hats. "And you were wrong. I can't prove it," he added, with the air of someone granting, for the sake of argument, that they don't know absolutely the moon isn't made of green cheese until someone goes and takes samples. "Because you can't prove a negative. But it's very probable you were wrong." 

"About what, exactly? I _live_ by these rules." He thumbed through the manual. Mattias, it seemed, had no instinctive horror of writing in books; there were scribbled annotations, underlined passages, and a few points where he'd just written '!' three centimeters high and circled it repeatedly. Mattias must have gone combing through for something to support his argument, but Phillipos couldn't for the life of him remember what they'd argued about.

Mattias crossed his arms. "About whether I can join the Corbettite Order."

That hadn't even been an argument, just four sentences of question-and-answer. Phillipos remembered it only for how odd it was a boy of ten hadn't grasped the obvious reason. Unless - "Are you thinking of converting?" he asked, trying to conceal his alarm. They didn't need a repeat of the Mrs. Brioche incident.

"No." Mattias glanced around the shed, like he was trying to be sure they were alone. "You see," he went on in his trying-to-be-polite voice, "it doesn't say anywhere in the manual you _have_ to be Papist to join the Corbettite Order. Or get baptized. Which is good, because I don't think my mother would like it if I got baptized. But I want to join the Order. So I can work on trains. So you were wrong, and it doesn't matter that I'm a Bogomilite." He had hit the caboose of his train of thought, apparently; he folded his hands and looked eager. 

Phillipos took a deep breath and pinched the bridge of his nose. He'd come out here with wrenches to put a new brakeshoe on the Silver Shuck; he wasn't equipped for theological debate. "Aren't there rules about worshiping idols?"

"Yes." Mattias looked slightly smug. "We're allowed to do it when we're guests in someone else's land. So if I were living with you I could sacrifice to the Papist God."

"He doesn't actually ask for sacrifice, you know." Phillipos could tell the boy would need a bit of remedial religious edu - dammit, why was he thinking like this was a _possibility_? 

"Huh? Don't you give him wine and bread?"

"He gives us. It's symbolic." This, Phillipos decided with vicious satisfaction, should clearly be dealt with by someone with more spiritual expertise. "Look, why don't you help me with this shoe, and then I'll bring you to see Father Donni and talk about this - idea?"

"It's my _destiny_," Mattias declared with bright-eyed earnesty. His dark cheeks were ruddy in the cold and his grin was crooked-toothed.

\--

It was a bright summer day. Brother Evariste tilted his hat up enough to wipe the sweat from his forehead, wondering if that color-changing crystal Brother Gjergj had come up with could be adapted to eyeglasses, and squinted at the tableau forming against the coal car.

"I don't see why he still hangs around here," Phillipos muttered. 

"Where else would he get this kind of audience?" Evariste glanced up at the sun. Not even noon.

"The Academy? Isn't that what they're for?"

The tableau consisted of Mattias, clutching an ominous arrangement of copper piping and a bottle, and an audience of mostly hang-on children of ages from six up to fifteen, same as Mattias, and four adult monks over twenty who should know better. Also two novices. Well, maybe there would be something useful in the demonstration; Mattias had a way with chemical reactions. 

Evariste offered, "He's almost old enough for the novitiate. I don't suppose you've ..."

"Had a go at converting him?" Phillipos was fiddling with his adjustable wrench, like he always did when he was nervous. "I, well, that's really the Abbot's business, isn't it?"

In other words, the topic was too awkward to bring up and Phillipos didn't want to risk it. It was hard to be annoyed with him for that. If anyone charismatic and socially ept joined the Corbettites, it was out of stunned pity for the rest of them. 

Mattias was pouring the alcohol mixture he'd made into a little brass tunnel on top the arrangement of piping, and explaining that it was a slight reconfiguration of a device invented in Aalborg last year. It was probably just as well, Evariste thought, they were standing two tracks away. 

"You know," he said, while the audience watched Mattias light a long splinter, "he wouldn't be the only brother who somehow never turns up at Mass."

"Oh God," Phillipos said with some feeling. "Has he been telling you about the loophole?"

"If we're going by the letter of the Manual -"

The little device went _BANG_. Phillipos dropped his adjustable wrench. Evariste automatically looked over the ground for casualties, but apparently it was supposed to do that; the audience were cheering and the thing on top that looked like a crankshaft was spinning at, frankly, an alarming rate. Mattias poured in more of the fuel and it started to let out an alarming whistle. 

The adjustable wrench had just barely missed Evariste's foot on the bounce. He crouched down to pick it up. "Say, where d'you suppose he got the copper?" 

"Saint Szpac's automatic hat," Phillipos groaned, with some feeling, "I'm going to have to run inventory again, aren't I?" 

\--

"Where is he?" 

"Resting." Phillipos nodded in the general direction of the Vice-Abbot's office, which hadn't been used for anything but storing spare stationery in three years, but still contained a more-or-less comfortable couch where visitors used to sit, and more importantly, could be put out of use for the afternoon without affecting the train schedule. They were under enough strain after the explosions. "I sent Evariste to fetch his mother." 

"Wise of you." Father Donni ran both hands through his hair. As often as he did that it wasn't surprising he never wore hats. "No damage to the boy?" 

"Only bruises. He'll be fine. Better than most Sparks manage for a breakthrough project." 

"We thank the Lord for small mercies," Donni said, casting his eyes at the ceiling as if daring the Lord not to provide them. "I didn't get a good look at the sheds, and the Silver Shuck won't make the evening run to Calais -" ever again, Phillipos found himself adding in his thoughts - "but I heard the Monaco evening express passing by, so we can bring up the number five spare while we get things in order again. Unless that was the spare on the Monaco?" Phillipos spread his hands - he hadn't been paying attention to the trains, just to Mattias. "Oh, well, we'll work something out by evening. We've weathered worse disasters. Why, this might not be a disaster at all." 

It was perfectly acceptable, given the dangers they faced and the importance of practical knowledge in averting them, for an ordinary Corbettite brother to contradict his abbot. Not, however, with the first words that sprung to Phillipos's mind. He took a deep breath and looked out the window, where the late spring rain was already washing the smoke clouds out of the air and on to a lot of innocent passenger cars that would need to be given a proper soaping, sometime later, once they had the men to spare for it. "It was a breakthrough," he said finally. "None of them are gentle, least of all to the one doing the breaking. I wouldn't take the trials God gives Sparks before they can wield his power." 

"You subscribe to the idea, then, that the power is holy?" 

"All God's creations have purpose and I'm not a theologian. I repair trains." Phillipos crossed his arms. "Poor Mattias only wanted the same." 

"Wanted?"

"Well, he can hardly join the Corbettites. He's been asking for seven years, and we've been telling him no for seven years. You talked to him, don't you remember?" 

Donni looked aside. "We should talk later," he said, and sounded very old and very tired. "Don't worry, we're not going to have another Mrs. Brioche incident. I don't think. I'm going to go pray for guidance, I'll be in my office. Come find me when the boy's mother turns up, would you?" 

They didn't talk until past midnight. Mattias woke up, accepted and drank a cup of very hot tea with too much sugar, and went home in his mother's stern protective custody. Spare engine five was duly affixed to a fresh coal car and sent on to Gare du Ciel to pick up the Calais passengers. A crew with lightning prods, measuring rods, and sketchpads descended on the Silver Shuck, an initial attempt to check whether it could be returned to service with perhaps a few small modifications from an expert - read, another Spark - or if it would have to be neutralized and broken down for parts. Phillipos had the expertise to join them and should have, but he pleaded his possibly-sprained shoulder and went to the crew quarters to lay down with a piece of cold iron. He had a room in the brother's hostel, most of a kilometer away. He didn't want to be that far from the rest of his engines. 

When he emerged Father Thutmoses had turned up from Mont Cliquet; he must have come in on the midnight Monaco train. He'd brought two brothers from the Containment Office, in the traditional green glass goggles and some distinctly nontraditional leather helmets, who hurried off to examine the Shuck's remains. "Just for the sake of the record," he told them briskly. "It sounded like you already had the thing corralled."

"Yes, Father." Phillipos leaned back in his chair; the canteen was quiet at this hour, except for the faint gaslight hiss and the burble of the tea urn, but it might as well have had an engine missing a wheel coming through for as shaky as he felt. "Only three serious injuries. Two who touched the firebox and a crushed foot. We sent them all up to St. Teodora's." The hospital could grow replacement skin in trays to handle the burn scars, and as for Seamus, he'd get used to a clank leg soon enough; he wasn't the first of them to find out the hard way how heavy a train could be. "We've seen worse."

Donni automatically crossed himself, murmuring, "May God have mercy on the Lady's crew." Phillipos and Thutmoses bowed their heads; all their minds had gone to the same place. When the priest looked up his smile was strained. "The pressure-catcher valve on the methane port was absolutely beautiful, you know. I'd be begging the lad to join up, except - well. You know." 

"I'm afraid I don't," Thutmoses said, in the gentle implacable voice that made him such a good Spark-wrangler and the best possible abbot for chaotic Mont Cliquet. "Your briefing was twelve words long, Leo. It's not a matter of beard, is it? We've closed our eyes on that before."

"Worse. Mattias is a Bogomilite."

They all looked at the table for a good long while. 

Eventually Thutmoses asked, voice dark and heavy, "What was he doing hanging around the repair yards, then? Denouncing us as the soldiers of materialism and a barrier to true spiritual understanding?" 

"Worse. Trying to join." Phillipos rubbed his temples. 

"A Bogomilite?" 

"I don't think he's a very observant one." Quite the opposite. "He said there wasn't anything in the Manual that actually demanded baptism as a condition of entry, and, well, he's train-mad. They don't like machinery much. Or schedules. Or Sparks." 

"Well then." Thutmoses tapped his fingers on the table. "I believe there is something in the manual about providing sanctuary to fugitives?"

"You can't be - " Phillipos managed, before he was interrupted by a shocked gasp from Father Donni and a high pitched cry of, "Impossible!" Did the man have no sense of proportion? Well, perhaps he didn't. He closed his eyes as Donni went on, "How can we ask someone to take a vow of poverty who thinks the material world -"

This time Thutmoses slammed the table with the flat of his hand. 

"We can't," he said. "We bring him in as a tertiary and then we make sure no one gets a good look at the paperwork, especially if they wear a fancy purple hat. I know you've no shortage of Papists in Paris, but we will _forever_ have a shortage of Sparks." 

There was silence while the three of them considered this.

"Brother Phillipos," Thutmoses said eventually. "Set aside the question of religion for a moment and take it as an axiom that we all serve the same God. Given that, do you think young Mattias would be an asset to the Corbettite Order?"

He had to be honest. "He would certainly serve our worldly commissions well. He's - eager to serve."

"Well."

"Come on," Donni burst out. "You can't say the Bogomilites serve the same God. They're metaphysical dualists, by Szpac."

Thutmoses rolled his eyes. "Come off it, Leo. I've heard you giving thanks to Albia on the Watling Line."

"That's different, isn't it? She built the blessed thing, didn't she?"

"And I'm sure His Holiness in Dublin would say just the same, would he?"

"Oh, you're going to write him and ask and remind him Mont Cliquet exists and houses half a dozen dangerous Sparks who get all the steam and steel they could possibly need to, just for example, build a siege engine and destroy half of Dublin?"

"We're dangerous," Thutmoses said, perfectly evenly for all that his hands on the scratched wooden surface of the canteen table were clenched tight. "It's in our Manual."

Phillipos was glad not to be sitting between them; that glare looked scorching.

But finally Donni said, "Alright. I'll recommend Mattias for the novitiate. _You_ get to explain it to his mother."

\--

Evariste had been to Mont Cliquet before, of course. He'd been brakeman on trains for a while, and traveled from Dublin to Athens to Archangelsk. But for twelve years now he had adjusted hydraulics and refitted rotors at the Paris yards. In those twelve years they'd added an entire line of defenses. It must be half a kilometer across now; the new walls spilled out of the Valley of Grace in a broad black semicircle, as if Cliquet had decided to go volcanic again and picked this spot for an exploratory lava field. He couldn't help but whistle in admiration.

"There's two tracks in," Mattias said. "Why are there three gates?"

He'd spent most of the trip asking awkward questions and Evariste offering quiet internal prayers for patience. At least it was an improvement on the shaken silence of three months ago. "I don't know," Evariste admitted. "Maybe it's in case someone wants to take a walk without running into a train."

"But you said there's no regular service to Mont Cliquet except the mail runs and the weekly food wagon."

"That's true," their driver said without looking up from his throttle. The draisine had developed an alarming rattle as they drew in sight of the gates, but he had kept it at a frantic pace. "Irregular service, though, that's all the time. Urgent parts deliveries. Brothers trying to catch the next express to Paris. Folks like you, coming from Paris. Once a week or so someone takes a new wagon out for a test run."

Mattias's eyes lit up. "You know, the curves going down wouldn't produce enough centrifugal force unless you were going -"

"- a hundred fifty." The driver's eyes were just as bright. "We test at a hundred seventy. There's a special engine. We call her the Gargoyle. Runs on a mix of coal gas and airship fuel, and her bodywork is solid steel."

"Why's that?"

"So she's easier to repair when something fails the test. Don't worry, lad, we don't have to drag her back on the tracks by hand, we have clanks for that."

Mattias fell silent. His face had scrunched up; he must already be thinking of ways the test engine could be improved. Well, fine, it kept him quiet.

The draisine clicked and rattled through the center gate, and right away it fell closed behind them, sides clanking together followed by the low thud of a bolt. Evariste couldn't help but blink. The gates last time he saw them were manual. "Have you been getting raiders?"

"Wild beasts." The driver sighed like a man who'd been deprived of the chance to rip something limb from limb. "We have deathrays, but Father Thutmoses keeps talking about preventing unnecessary violence."

The inside of the new wall was all yard, crisscrossing tracks and open-ended sheds,seven roller cranes, one massive trunk crane in the middle - being used, right now, to settle a section of arched paneling onto a flat wagon painted a disturbing green - and something tucked next to the wall that looked as if had started life as a steam engine, but by now was covered in a massive concretion of pipes and valves and extra fireboxes, like a blackberry bush trying to overtake a house. Mattias gave a little gasp of delight as he saw it. Evariste squinted for a better look, but they were still moving fast, and they clicked through the inner gate before he could figure out where all its pipes were going.

The old yard had a massive stone building where its sheds used to be, huddled against the bulk of the ridge. Their driver finally let up on the throttle and grabbed the brake lever. Evariste grabbed at the railing and just managed not to be thrown into Mattias, and then to grab Mattias by the belt before he went over the rail, as the draisine slammed to a shop right in front of its massive doors.

From the doors, inlaid enamel figures of St. Szpac and St. Corbet beamed down at them, as if to assure them their faithful servants would come to no harm. He'd have to give a prayer of thanks once his heart stopped pounding.

"Door-to-door service," their driver said, as if it were something to be proud of. "Go in, Father Thutmoses is expecting you. His office is in the south tower."

Right. "Go in peace, brother," Evariste managed, and tried to step down from the draisine without falling over his own feet.

It was quiet inside the new building, tne kind of quiet that suggested everyone was at supper. Mattias was still wordless as they made their way up to the Abbot's office, but he kept sneaking glances out the window as if he weren't quite sure this place was real.

As promised, Thutmoses was waiting in his office. Twelve years had added a few grey hairs, but the quietly distracted look and the gold-rimmed half-moon glasses were the same. He had a massive platter of bread and cheese, and he was sipping tea from a mug with 'Ite Animose' in elaborate script on the side and a brass bottom whose deep scrollwork probably meant it was self-heating. He stood up to greet them, beaming. "Brothers! Welcome to Mont Cliquet. I hope your journey was peaceful?"

"It was," Mattias answered right away, "but your draisine needs a new timing chain and a rebuilt gearbox on the left side. And the signal box at the Rue Bertrand crossing is about to short out."

None of which was Thutmoses's concern, but Evariste bit his lip. The boy had to learn sometime. 

But Thutmoses only nodded solemnly, as if all this was the most useful thing Mattias could have said. "It will be seen to," he declared. "Sit, sit. Help yourselves to some supper. And tea." He waved at the glistening brass thing on the side table, which Evariste had taken for an engine model despite, he realized with a wince, the empty mugs set beside it. "Young Mattias. Has anyone told you why you were sent here?"

"No," Mattias said. "But it's because I'm a Spark and you want me to design engines for you, right? And if I can do a good job at it for a year you'll let me join up properly?"

The novitiate year was to make sure their brothers understood what the Manual meant, wouldn't regret their vows, and to give them a chance to back out. _Let_ had nothing to do with it. Evariste took a deep breath. Maybe it wasn't fair to expect a boy raised as a Bogomilite to understand that. Maybe they should try to cure his train-madness and the novitiate year was a trial for the rest of them.

But Thutmoses was beaming. "Oh, I don't think there's much question of your doing a good job. Father Donni sent me your sketches, you know. We just want to teach you what our engines need to do, and what tools we have to build them with. You belong with us, son."

"Father," Evariste couldn't help but blurt out, "aren't there theological implications to consider?"

Thutmoses looked over his half-moon glasses at Evariste, and the brother suddenly felt very small and uncomfortably aware that Thutmoses had been the abbot at Mont Cliquet for twenty years and had more experience wrangling Sparks than anyone on the continent, except perhaps Baron Wulfenbach and the Master of Paris, or a handful of unlucky university deans. "There are," he said, and set his self-heating tea mug on the desk. "For example. Faced with a blessing like a Spark who believes in our worldly causes, should we smother his light under a bushel, or give thanks and let it multiply?"

There was something wrong with that philosophy, Evariste was sure.

But, he decided, it was above his head. He would be obedient to an abbot. He wouldn't speak until it was time to say _I told you so._ He murmured something that might, with imagination, have been a prayer, and turned to the tea machine to try to figure out how to get tea from it. A minor trial.

\--

"Isn't it beautiful?"

Phillipos and Evariste looked at each other. Then they looked at the thing in the middle of the repair yard. It was bigger than most of their engines, and the snowflakes seemed to be melting even before they landed on it, and the huge sculpted reptilian face on the front seemed to promise some malevolent fate through its glowing yellow eyes.

"It's called the Wyrm of Limerick," Mattias informed them proudly. "We're going all the way to Holfung-Borzoi for a trial and if it works Thutmoses says he'll put us on the regular run from Paris to Athens! Because they need the speed increase! I knew I could do it!"

Phillipos shook himself out of his trance. It really did look like an amazing engine. "Of course you could, lad," he said. "We never doubted you."


	4. Oct. 10: Original characters |  Tea and Plausible Deniability

#### Oct. 10: Original characters | Tea and Plausible Deniability

[I've wondered about the diplomatic corps that are mentioned in a few footnotes as trying hard to keep Albia's and Baron Wulfenbach's empires on a good footing. They must be pretty good at working together.]

\--

"Frogs were not originally carnivorous, but our Queen is nothing if not creative and adaptable." 

"Well, it's no worse than I've heard of Mechanicsburg," Gjergj muttered. 

Dame Edna Cadwalladr took a sip of her tea. On her own account she preferred Darjeeling, but one must be polite to one's guests and Gjergj, dear old bat, had an insatiable lust for Tieguanyin. "Ah, yes. And have you hear anything more of Mechanicsburg lately? That you are prepared to reveal to the enemy?" 

"You don't have to be like that, you cad," he said, with the same snicker as if the pun were actually clever that he had made the last thirty years. Thirty years ago, of course, he had been her friend entirely without portfolio; the Empire he served now had yet to be founded, and Gjergj had looked set to spend the rest of a comfortable career at Transylvania Polygnostic, studying the fates of long-dead Sparks but keeping across campus from the living ones. "We're not going to war, right? Her Majesty still prepared to just put up with the Baron?" 

"If her preference for peace on the continent has changed, she didn't speak of it to me." It would be undignified to laugh. 

"Well then." Gjergj leaned back in his armchair, the picture of a satisfied man. "The thing is. The thing is, I've heard less than usual. Used to be calls for personnel and Sparks getting flown in from all over the place and massive construction projects, and now it's just a lot of couriers. Which makes me think that His Nibs has actually worked something out about what's going on with the giant bubble. Don't ask me what, I'm no Spark. Don't you lot have spies for this kind of thing?" 

"I'm sure I can't speak to Her Majesty's intelligence assets in Mechanicsburg," Edna declared, as prim and proper as could be. "I don't work for the Watling Street Office. But surely you understand the importance of unofficial channels of _communication_." 

"Of course I do, Edna. I may not have been at this game as long as you but we both know what the winning conditions are, don't we?" 

"Yes." 

Gjergj nodded. They were _diplomats_, and whatever a certain halfwit had said, war was the ultimate failure of diplomacy. 

Which was why she and Gjergj had these quiet, deniable teas in a private room of an establishment more typically frequented by graduate students. Officially, they were both part of permanent diplomatic missions to Paris and should have little to say to each other directly. Unofficially, Paris was neutral ground, ideal for working these things out without interference from overhead. 

"One has to wonder," Edna offered eventually, "if the quiet around Mechanicsburg is because they're running out of ideas."

"Maybe _you_ have to wonder. Maybe English madboys know when to quit." Gjergj took a decisive bite of eclair. "Continentals have more backbone."

"Obviously. You people leave graves lying around in the open. Backbone, skull, just bring a shovel."

Gjergj snorted so hard he must have inhaled a bit of eclair by mistake, and it took several gasping seconds to dislodge it. Edna helpfully pounded on his back one-handed. Once he'd recovered his wits Gjergj laid the second half of his eclair down - it must be serious if the old bat couldn't talk and eat at once - and declared, "I'm still convinced the Baron's found something. He has to be the one who grabbed Zardilev. Nobody else has a motive." 

"Or someone thought Zardilev was on to something and abducted him to keep him from revealing his researches to the Baron," Edna pointed out, but her heart wasn't in it. Gjergj was so often depressingly right. "I mean, any _sensible_ person would have offered him bribes to sabotage the effort -"

"- but we can't assume our enemies are sensible, right." He winced; he must be thinking of the Gdansk Incident. "Or that Zardilev was bribeable."

"We know he was smart, though. He dodged enough assassination attempts. If the Baron doesn't have him, it likely means he vanished of his own accord."

They contemplated this prospect in silence, while outside the last of the sunset trickled away and the streetlights began to click to life. Edna helped herself to another eclair.

Gjergj shook his head, frowning at nothing in particular. "I don't suppose you know of any kairologists who are getting tired of Londinium? Or that ... your Lady would send us in exchange for something? Not that I'm asking for classified intelligence," he added hastily. "Just for you to ask?"

It was a good thing he wasn't asking for anything classified, because Edna, however much trust she had from the Watling Street Office, had nothing at all to do with the Queen's Society. She spread her hands. "I can make suggestions, but I sincerely doubt my voice will have much weight when it comes to scientific expertise." 

"Suggestions are plenty." Gjergj leaned forward, hands on his knees and bunching up his trousers, not that wrinkles would have shown on the kind of trousers he preferred. "Even if Mechanicsburg stays in that bubble for a thousand years I'd be happier seeing us _work together_ on something." 

It was harder to declare war on someone when they had half of your metaphysical assets camping out at their university, certainly. But Edna was skeptical about the long-term advantages. Cleaning out leftover devices of the Other together hadn't kept the first Baron Wulfenbach from withdrawing his ambassadors over the Gdansk Incident. The Popes had spent the last three centuries ganging up on each other in holy wars, and the gangs changed every time. Sweet lightning, the War of Mactavish's Cape had started out one of those little spats Holfung-Borzoi and Orcznik liked to have every few decades just to keep the hatred alive, and ended with the two of them bravely holding out against an alliance of Dunsany, Aalborg, and Grand Aquitaine. No, diplomacy was a continuous process. And if greater considerations dictated that her Queen abandon her preference for peace on the continent, neither sentiment nor the unfortunate loss of a few mortal Sparks would deter her. 

Of course, Edna could admit none of these qualms to Gjergj. Even setting aside the policy considerations of just how far their little teas could stray from official - the answer so far had been _anywhere short of openly advocating a coup_ \- the old bat was too much of an optimist. He thought that even if the peace they were so quietly working to keep was broken, it would come back once people had the chance to talk things over properly. And so, Edna saved dark mutterings for her own rooms at night, and kept their little talks to the matter of what they _could_ do. For example. "There's still a lot of the North Sea to clean up. You know what our Queen thinks of pirates." 

"That they should only be working for her?" 

"Really now, Gjergj." 

"Good idea, but I don't know if it'd work. His Nibs said we really should leave everything across the sea alone for a year or two after that mess with the Polar Ice Lords. Suppose he's waiting for the Great Wall to break down." 

"Is it? Breaking down?" 

"Apparently so. Someone went and undermined the thing with something that makes soil decompose and it's just ... sinking into the landscape. But taking its own sweet time, and there are parts build on rock that will have to be dealt with by hand, and ... well. Can't finish the job until there's a warm summer, apparently. I just hope Trygvassen doesn't turn up again and decide to interfere." Rolling her eyes wasn't helpful, but Edna did it anyway. "So much for protecting the rest of the world from Norway for a thousand years." 

"Well. What one Spark can do another can undo. I don't even know who decided to undermine it. Might have been His Nibs being subtle for once." Gjergj gulped at his tea, grimacing at the heat. "If it had gone over faster it might have crushed buildings," he added, sounding a little more subdued. "There's a lot of people who built right up against the Wall. Hell, there's some people who'll be looking for a new side to their houses. The Polar Ice Lords would have been so mad." 

"If they still existed." Edna allowed herself a tight-lipped smile. "At least whoever takes over once you people leave will have a harder time of it. That thing was the worst excuse for unnecessary tollgating since the Permian Gorge." 

"Do you Brits always have to think about money first?" 

"Do you continentals always have to assume it's possible to rule a country on docking fees and gifts from the nobility? Come on, Gjergj. You were the one who taught me _history rolls on wheels of gold._" The quote was one he used to use in lectures, and the comment was rank exaggeration; Edna had known how history moved before she started at Oxford, let alone Transylvania Polygnostic.

"If I'd know you were going to be so difficult thirty years later," he muttered, "I would never have been your thesis advisor."

Her smile was the prim smile of politeness in victory. "So you finally admit you don't know everything?" 

"Oh, I kne that all along. For example, I have not the foggiest notion how to play the accordion. Or what exactly one is supposed to do with that eating implement that looks like a spoon with fangs. Carve watermelon? Slay your enemies? My point is, Edna, there are human motives beyond money. For example, both our respective rulers seem to have inexorable urges to _show them all_ -" 

" - despite having already shown everyone who needs to know?" She hid her frown behind a sip of tea. It was true her Queen tended to the ostentatious, but she had every excuse, and Edna had to hope it was nothing worse than a tasteless attempt at intimidation on the Baron's part when he did things like put up giant statues of the Lady Heterodyne. "Consider the implications of that too long and you circle back to Great Man theory."

"I'm beginning to come around to it," Gjergj admitted with a sigh. "Can you imagine Britain without Albia?"

"Our Queen is hardly a Great Man. I think she could more rightly be qualified as a ... force of nature. Britain without Albia - that's like asking if Egypt could have built so much without the Nile. If you want to argue for Great Man theory you should open with a consideration of Andronicus Valois."

"Really? I think he's a bit over-hyped. His Empire outlived him by what, five years?"

"The _echoes_, though."

Gjergj stared at the wall for a while. Then he slumped forward again, and snagged the last eclair. "You're right, but if I ever have ten days free to sit down and _write_ again I think I'll argue on Klaus Wulfenbach. It'll make more of a point. People remember the Other War. There are even some old codgers like me who remember the Long War."

"You say that as if the Long War were not in the midst of a renaissance."

"Thunder and no lightning. Give it two years, everyone'll remember how stupid it was lobbing rocks at each other all the damn time."

Gjergj was an optimist. 

And Edna was not, but she was a knight of a realm that had stood unopposed for longer than any human lifetime, even such a drawn-out life as the Master of Paris. That was its own kind of hope. 

"I certainly hope so," she declared. "We don't make our money on munitions."

"Hah!" Gjergj paused just long enough to lick a smear of custard off his fingers. "But about money. You people used to have no-tariff deals with Mechanicsburg -"

" - the independent principality." They'd hardly been much of a trade partner, tiny and far from the sea, but they had certain types of mechanical expertise for cheaper than British wages. "Given everything that's happened since, I think those agreements would need to be renegotiated. Assuming Mechanicsburg returns to its independent status after its restoration."

"That was what the old Baron had down." Gjergj shrugs. "For all I know the new one's going to turn over the continent to Lady Heterodyne and retire to her harem."

It took _work_ not to crack a smile at that, dammit. "In which case," Edna managed, "the obvious move would be to extend the old agreements to the entire Heterodyne Empire until further negotiations. Would hearing that make the Baron any more inclined to do it?"

"D'you really want to be the one to propose it to his face?"

"Well, I could. If he strangled me it would cause an international incident."

\--

At home in her own apartments, streetlights gleaming yellow outside and the noise of the embassy staff doing their nightly cleaning barely filtering through the floors, Edna settled onto the wooden chair by her bed and fixed her eyes on the portrait of the Queen on the opposite wall. Albia was smiling, hands spread wide in welcome. Her cloud of dark hair gleamed like the night sky beneath her crown of stars. 

Dame Edna Cadwalladr, Knight of the Realm, Ambassador to Paris, Doctor of History, did not bow her head in prayer. Albia discouraged it once she had met you in person. 

She didn't speak aloud, either; one never knew who would overhear, even safe in the heart of the British Embassy. But she could think what she couldn't say aloud, and what she thought was: _My queen, I hope you know what you're ding. I certainly don't know what I'm doing._

_Empires come and go but Britain endures. I've served you twenty-nine years; I know that's not a hundredth of the time you've reigned. I don't know if there will be another war._

_But if any land would be safe then, it would be Britain. You're not human, but you love us anyway. Keep it up. Please._

Albia kept smiling. What else could a portrait be expected to do?

\--


	5. Oct. 11: plotholey | The Groundhog King

#### Oct. 11: I got tied up in plot holes when I tried to write it before | The Groundhog King

[Also on hold for fear of jossing; I intend to take another crack when the main storyline is finished. And come up with a more dignified and in-universe-explicable title than 'The Groundhog King'.]

\--

Tarvek had read a penny-sparkly once about a man who had to live the same day over and over again. If he fell asleep, he woke up in his own bed on the morning before. If he died, he woke up in his own bed on the morning before. He kept cycling and cycling, trying to work out _why_, what he had to do to break the loop. He lived three years worth of the same day.

Life should be so easy.

If Tarvek dies, this will be over for good. No more second chances. And so he holds still against the touch of Lady Vrin's sword on his neck and doesn't say a word, watches silently as Lucrezia watches laughing as the blood dribbles out of the unsightly hole in Gilgamesh's chest, and thinks to himself: Time for a fifth try.

Lucrezia glides over to him once Gil is well and truly dead, with a smirk that looks all wrong on her daughter's face. She tips up his chin with just the tip of her finger, and his mind shies away from any analogies. "I won't have to do that to you, will I?"

"No, Mistress," he says. She never managed to reproduce the Spark Wasp this time. She has to think he's helping her willingly.

"Good boy. I knew you had a little more sense." She trails the finger down his neck, and spins away. "Guards! Take this trash to the incinerator."

It will take a year, judging from hideous experience, for her to trust him in a lab alone. It has to be a mechanical lab, with a high-precision spectral analyzer and a cryogenic source for the superconduction, and he needs a lightning strike for power. The plans are burned in his mind. He just needs a chance.

So, another year of pretending to be her loyal slave, helping her subjugate the rest of Europa with a smile on his face, making sure he's too useful to brain-core.

Tarvek tells himself he can put up with anything for a year. He's done it before.

There's just a puddle of blood on the floor of Lucrezia's throne room where Gilgamesh used to be.

\--

Attempt seven.

Tarvek settles into his old body - no, not old, that's an absurd word to apply to a body that's not even twenty-five - with a thump that knocks him unconscious, as usual. It's not much of a risk. He picked a point when he wasn't holding dangerous chemicals. It would be nice to go back further - oh, the things he might accomplish if he could project himself back to age six - but the world is never convenient. 

When he struggles back to consciousness it's eleven in the morning and he has eight hours and thirty-seven minutes before everything goes wrong.

The first time Tarvek did this he shot his father before lunchtime, wound up fleeing the castle barely ahead of Veilchen, and it took two years of misery while the world collapsed around him, living in the Paris underground like a rat, before he got the machine assembled and working. The time before that, the original, he'd wound up wasped, and only Lucrezia's carelessness eventually saved him. _Go see what your relatives are up to._ Grabbing Uncle Tik-Tok's notes counted and, well, she never ordered him to share - but it was Lucrezia's own machines that put the idea into his mind. One ironic thing to be grateful for.

Twenty-three years of subjective time since then. He's had much worse than wasping in the interval. The memory of having to smile while Gilgamesh died still leaves him trembling with horror. Well - if he plays it right, they'll all live. Tarvek spends the precious afternoon making up the wasp inoculation he finally worked out the formula for, last time around, then makes his way to the theater.

He welcomes Agatha to Sturmhalten Castle as if the sight of her in that ridiculous seafoam gown didn't make his throat close up. He slips the inoculation into her wineglass, hoping the interaction with Great-aunt Rappacini's truth serum is as weak as he modeled it, and when she starts to convulse from the side effects Tarvek offers to carry her to his room to recover while his sister titters and cracks jokes instead of offering him her bearers. 

There's just enough time to run his hand down Agatha's face like a lovesick idiot before Vrin bursts in, because his father apparently can't keep a bloody secret for the life of his Goddess, and Tarvek can only plead complaints about her altered mental state before it's over, because they've never gotten Lucrezia _out_.

If Tarvek lived in that penny-sparkly he would have pulled out his hidden dagger and slashed his own throat to save time. He's not so lucky. 

\--

The theory Uncle Tik-Tok had sketched out, ringed around with hesitancies and the difficulty of empirical testing, says a timeline should fade from existence when its history is altered. It says it much more scientifically, but that's how Tarvek would explain it to someone not familiar with the complicated tenses of kairology.

Would, if he could confide in anyone at all.

\--

Nine. He slips out of the castle to - not kidnap Agatha outright, she didn't like it and it didn't work, but tell the circus their permit's been revoked and they have to leave. Then he follows them.

It seems like it works, for most of a week. Castle Heterodyne is repaired. The Jägers reappear. Gilgamesh shows up, looking like he's half a breath away from leaping on Agatha like a lost puppy. Selnikov turns up at the gates with his war stompers, bits of the plan still spinning as the whole assembly flies apart; Agatha fries them, and Tweedle turns up just in time to be invited to the victory banquet.

Agatha vanishes in the middle of it.

After nine repetitions Tarvek is losing track of the details, and he doesn't even know why this feels so familiar. He swallows the sinking feeling, grabs Violetta to start hunting, and doesn't fall to the floor and weep no matter how badly he wants to, no matter how sharp the edge of despair. The situation is still salvageable. For a week he let himself hope.

Three months later the Lady Heterodyne marries the Storm King, in a grand public ceremony in the Red Cathedral. Tarvek watches from atop one of the gargoyles the Heterodynes, with typical restraint, had had installed inside the nave. He can see the fixed edge of the smile on Martellus's face. He used to hate Martellus, but even in the first iteration he wouldn't have wished a wasping on the man.

Time to get out and start building. 

\--

The maddening thing is how little time it usually takes before everything goes wrong. He's spent twice as long building the machinery for his resets as he has trying to steer things right. Eleven hours is still a new low. 

"Don't be ridiculous, brother dear," Anevka tells him, from the little audio device in her neck instead of the fixed porcelain smile where her lips should be. "You should know exactly what our father wanted. This was the fastest way to prevent it."

Tarvek agrees, of course. It's instinctive, to agree when someone makes demands in that imperious tone of voice, go along before they can decide he's an impediment to their plans. He pastes a smile back on and doesn't look at the burnt hulk that used to be Agatha's body. What's one more dead girl?

There's work to be done. They have to move fast before Vrin discovers their treason. 

Tarvek moves through the next few months without really being aware of them. He feels like he's watching some foreign entity move his limbs and speak, a familiar sensation but not one that's ever gone on this long, not more than a few days. It feels like what the naive child he used to be (forty years ago, so long ago he'd almost be old by now) thought wasping must feel like, before he knew how much worse the reality was. The Questor is long gone. Tarvek is lord of Sturmhalten. The Geisterdamen are still pointlessly searching. 

It occurs to him eventually, staring at the green leather top of what used to be his father's official desk, that he's gotten his primary objective. The Other won't be back. And didn't Agatha say she wanted that at any price, she'd hand herself over to Baron Wulfenbach for that, she'd die for that?

She had. 

It also occurs to him, staring at the message in Shrdlu's spidery handwriting and a language very few humans speak, that he never worked out where exactly they were summoning their Goddess back _from_.

Tarvek is familiar with the concept of _motivated reasoning_, and how right something can look if you want it badly enough. He wants Agatha to live. He wants to live by her side. He wants his next forty years to take him all the way to the nineteen-thirties, while he and Agatha rebuild the Storm King's empire and bring peace and prosperity to Europa and raise their children to follow them. If he can't arrange that, he wants something like it for Agatha and Gilgamesh, and he wants his death to be in their service. It is entirely possible Tarvek wants that so badly he's deluding himself that there's a risk Lucrezia will find some other way to turn up.

All the required components are in his private lab regardless, ordered on autopilot. It's easy to work in the depths of despair when you're Lord of Sturmhalten, with plenty of tax revenue and an entourage of helpful servants. 

Technically, he could keep waiting. He could spend twenty years watching for a sign the Other has some other way to return. Or he could be reckless, borrow money and beg favours and leave a trail of broken trust and mystified agents while he hunted for traces and answers, secure in the knowledge this whole world would be cut off next time. For that matter, he could forget pretending to work with the ladies in the basement. He could strap Vrin to a lab table and let Anevka work her over until she bled out every hint she had. If she had any.

The Geisterdamen bring the girl they've just kidnapped, from a farm somewhere in Padania, up through the secret passages, tied up in spider-silk and still woozy with their sedative venom. Anevka comes to tell him, and ask if he wants to watch. Tarvek says he'll be there as soon as he finishes his experiment. Anevka does the little reverse-nod she has to do now rather than roll her eyes, and leaves him be.

It only takes a minute to finish the experiment, and Tarvek dives back to his sleeping past with a feeling like he's just spat out poisoned wine.

\--

There's a better source of information, after all.

\--

The logical thing to do, now he's thought of what he should have thought of twelve iterations ago, would be to let the evening play out just as it did the first time, then play along. Be the perfect consort. Give Lucrezia everything she wants, until she trusts him enough to open up. He at least pretended well enough to keep his skin, the fourth time. The logical thing is use a failure as leverage for the next, better attempt.

Tarvek thinks all this, and then he opens his eyes, rolls off the sofa, and heads to his lab to start brewing a batch of wasp vaccine.

After he slips it into her dinner drink Agatha goes into convulsions and faints, just like the seventh try. Tarvek offers to let her sleep it off in his room, just like the seventh try, and waves off the footmen who try to help move her, and very unlike the seventh try he ducks into the secret passage with Agatha still mumbling deadweight in his arms and _runs_.

The Geisterdamen take the circus twenty kilometers outside town. Tarvek only lives because his father knocks aside Lucrezia's arm and yells at her not to forget they'll need him later, and if he were young and sentimental he might take that as a sign his father cared for him.

He gets wasped, instead. Lucrezia observes the process very carefully so she can duplicate it. It takes ten years this time to build the machine and escape, and Lucrezia never tells him where she was before she took over Agatha. 

\--

He has to keep thinking Uncle Tik-Tok was right, and the discarded timelines cease to exist. If that isn't true, who knows how much damage he's done?

\--

Attempt twenty-four. 

Tarvek stopped feeling like he had any say in what happened five iterations back. He's watching it all play out from somewhere in the back of his own mind, as if his body were a clank he'd tuned to try each mad hypothesis for how Agatha could be saved. It's just as well. If his conscious mind had any say it would be screaming to shoot himself and get it over with. His conscious mind is a coward. 

It goes worse than he expected, and he's backed into a closet trying not to breathe too loudly and hoping that the horde of revenants hunting for him aren't going to be diligent enough to find a Smoke Knight trying not to be seen even though some of them are Smoke Knights themselves, when the door opens and there's a monster standing there, something vast and gelatinous and only humanoid in the roughest of senses. "What will you be doing in there?" it demands, crackling like a mistuned voice box. "Come here! There was barely enough time!"

"What," Tarvek manages. His mind is racing. This is completely new. 

"You were safe," the gelatinous thing goes on, and takes his wrist and hauls him out of the safety of the closet. 

What happens over the next few minutes doesn't make any sense, even when he tries to reconstruct the events later. They pass through a room, and then the doorway that leads into it, and then they're ducking blaster fire down a hallway on the next floor without the inconvenience of going down the stairs first. There's a humanoid clank grabbing at Tarvek's wrist. 

Something goes _twang_ in the back of his head and then they're ducking blaster fire down a hallway. Tarvek barely has time to notice that it's damp blank stone and leads to the disused south laboratory before Higgs is shoving him up against a wall, both of them breathing hard. "Best not to think about it, sir," he says.

"What else do you expect me to _do?_" Tarvek answers. 

It's terrible the way his blood is pounding, so hard he can barely hear. He tosses aside a sword while the gelatinous creature gibbers in a high-pitched ululation, and then they're ducking blaster fire into a hallway. The woman-shaped clank is yelling orders somewhere behind them. Tarvek ignores her and focuses on trying not to trip as he's dragged out of the closet. "You were safe," the gelatinous creature tells him.

In the disused lab is a device Tarvek recognizes, because he built it. 

"Steady on, sir," Higgs says. Tarvek hisses, and Higgs shoves him against the wall. Somewhere far away is a metallic screech.

They duck blaster fire into the hallway. "This won't happen yet," the gelatinous creature tells him, and Tarvek can't draw the breath to contradict him. Faster, they have to move faster. The hallway is damp blank stone. At its other end is the disused south lab.

"What do you expect me to _do_?" Tarvek manages.

The woman-shaped clank closes a hand on his arm and then Higgs brings a sword down on its arm. There's a metallic screech. 

"Please, you were so fast," says the creature.

Something goes _twang_ in his head. 

The device is powering up and the door is barred and Tarvek looks over at the man who saved him, who he doesn't recognize, a blond fellow in an airman's uniform and an expression of grim resignation. Right. "Who are you?" he says, to both of them, because by all rights he should have died in the closet and this timeline been left to be true. 

The airman says, "Axel Higgs, your highness. Your backup."

"You tell me to bring him," the gelatinous creature announces. "You think it helps. Oh dear, this was very -"

Somewhere outside there's a metallic scream. 

Right. He needs to get out of here and think about the implications of this, and it's just a pity he'll arrive less than a day before deadline. Tarvek starts to check the device for _sabotage_, this is all _too convenient_. "_Guard the door_," he tells them. "Airman. What was your ship?"

"Rozen Maiden," Higgs answers. "Are you sure this is a good idea, sir?"

"No, but _do you have_ a _better one?_" There's not even a _misalignment_ of the _power lattice_ after all that noise. _Absurd._ "_Tell me a secret._"

Higgs swallows. He must have _some inkling_ of what's going on. "I used to write to Irene at Euterpe's Inn," he says. "I'll know what it means." Good secret, _naming_ a _forbidden romance_ will at least get the man's _attention_. Tarvek spins to ask the _creature_ how to _find_ it _earlier_-

-it's gone. It makes his head hurt to look where it should be.

Tarvek shakes his head, yanked out of his fugue and on edge. At least he saw nothing wrong with the machine. "Anything else I should know?"

"Sure but I don't know what," Higgs tells him, seeming quite unconcerned. Damn the man. "Good luck, sir."

_See you soon_ doesn't seem the thing to say. 

\--

The tense proves nothing, but that the creature was acting on instructions Tarvek doesn't remember giving proves - something. That there is a future, maybe, that he'll send back a message from it. Maybe that's why he can only go so far back. 

He wouldn't spike his own guns like that without an _excellent_ reason. Tarvek has to trust that he needs Higgs and the creature later, that he wasn't acting under some compulsion or making a terrible mistake. 

There are infinitely many ways this could go wrong, and he's only ruled out twenty-four of them. But - he won't die this time, at least not yet. For once Tarvek _knows_. 

\--

He's barely thought of Tinka, all this time. Was sad for her, of course, but in an abstracted way; she was safe in his lab and he would repair her, eventually, once he had time. The right time, not the overstretched, chopped-up simulacrum of life he's sixty years into now. 

Tarvek thinks of Tinka now, and he goes to his lab, and he invites her for a walk in town. It feels wrong to use her like this, but it would be worse not to try. He dresses her in his sister's old bronze day gown, since her fingers are too unsteady to tie her own laces, and drapes a lace veil over her head, the kind that were in fashion in Vienna thirty - in the eighteen-sixties. No one gives them more than passing glances. At the circus he tells the suspicious lady with the crossbow and strong smell of garlic that he's come to return something borrowed.

The round of shocked questions from people with no regard for the dignity of a prince takes so long to extricate himself from, Tarvek is tempted to simply vanish, but eventually the big red-headed circus master breaks it up and tries to send Tarvek away with elaborate gratitude. Tarvek stands firm. "I need to talk to Agatha Clay," he says. "Your Madame Olga." Not explaining how he knows her name is another thicket, but eventually they do fetch her. 

The sight of Agatha makes his breath catch, just as it does in his dreams. She's in ordinary town clothes and clutching a pile of script paper and glaring, her hair is a mess, and Tarvek wants to fall to his knees and beg forgiveness. Instead he beckons her close and whispers in her ear, "Your name is Agatha Heterodyne." She tenses. Tarvek hurries on, "You fled Castle Heterodyne with Othar Trygvassen after killing a hive queen, and threw him off the airship when he tried to shoot you. The real Madam Olga was killed by a crab clank in the wastelands, and your friends told Gilgamesh Wulfenbach the body was yours."

"What makes you think all that?" Loud, indignant, and admitting to nothing, for the benefit of her watching friends. Smart.

Tarvek licks his lips, leans in again, and says, "Because you told me last time."

His desperation must be obvious, because her next words are a little softer, more hiss than yell. "_What_ last time? I've never seen you before."

"Do you believe in time travel, my lady?" He takes her hand. "Or will you at least hear me out privately?"

Because, and the thought is trickling down his spine like etching acid, Agatha doesn't know yet what her mother was. Is. He should have brought a Geister priestess, except that sudden worship, on its own, would prove nothing either.

She won't see him alone, but she'll see him with only Princess Zeetha for witness. Zeetha raises an eyebrow when Tarvek calls her _your highness_, as is only proper, but she doesn't protest. She listens impassively to the story Tarvek tells, standing behind Agatha's chair with her arms crossed. Tarvek hurries as much as he can.

"Please come with me," he finishes. "We have to find Higgs, he's the only lead I have -

"No," Agatha says, and he knows he's not wasped this time and there's no reason for that voice to burn into his soul and undo all his convictions. "I'm going to Mechanicsburg."

He can't deny her. But he can steer. "Alright," he says, and swallows. "But can we leave right now? Before the show?" 

If his father never hears her voice -

Twenty minutes later, the blond valkyrie who had led Tinka away is hastily reading through Lucrezia's side for _Socket Wench of Prague_, and Tarvek, Zeetha, Krosp, and most importantly Agatha are on the _Neville Augusta_, due to dock outside Mechanicsburg at ten PM.

Tarvek wonders what's going to go wrong this time.

They get as far as the catacombs before the gelatinous creature turns up again. "You don't do this," he says, and he sounds horribly distressed, not quite in the way a human would be - voice quavering like a radio not hitting the frequency. "You won't do this." 

Carson - von Mekkhan, as he admitted when Tarvek flat-out accused him of it - shrieks. Apparently strange gelatinous apparitions aren't a standard part of the catacomb tour. Zeetha doesn't shriek; she draws her swords and steps forward, arms upraised, as if she's about to slice the creature in half. 

There was a time Tarvek would have thought about how to react to this, but he's old and tired and he steps under the swords to grab the thing by the belt and drive him into the wall with his weight, shield and trap at once. "Are you going to _tell me why_?"

"I told ... would tell you," the creature burbles. Tarvek could swear it's going in and out of focus. "This is not the time! Oh dear."

Tarvek doesn't remember what he shouts next, but it must have been alarming. He doesn't remember being knocked to the floor, either, but there's a boot on his shoulder and an angry cat on his chest, claws extended and hissing, "You're the one who needs to explain, buddy!"

The boot is Agatha's. That makes him feel a little better. 

"I really can't," he says. "I don't know what's going on."

The gelatinous creature burbles, "Of course. You're in the wrong - pancake? That wasn't the right word, was it?"

"Uh. Probably not." However strange she must think all this is, Zeetha still has her swords ready. 

"You people have such an inadequate language. I don't think you even knew what dreen do."

Somewhere far off water is dripping implacably onto a stone. 

At some point in the last few minutes, Carson must have recovered his wits. He clears his throat like a man about to offer a very polite insult. "You're the one who barged in on the Heterodyne's business, mister," he says. "I suggest you start explaining what exactly is going on. Whatever words you got. We'll manage."

"Eddy! You'll approach a guarded eddy! And the dreen don't want interference or you collapsed the - earthquake?" Is it his imagination or the funny lighting or is the creature turning blue? And the hands are swirling in distress. "I don't know exactly how it works, I'm just a vozzler, but you had - two more tries? Yes, two, and then it hits. So this pancake doesn't ... last. Won't last."

The boot is gone from his shoulder. Tarvek tries to sit up, carefully, and Krosp is either in a generous mood or too confused to protest; he hops down to Tarvek's lap as if he'd meant to, tail lashing. Tarvek looks up at Agatha. She has hands on her hips, a pensive look. It makes Tarvek's throat hurt to look at her, so young and determined, so ready to fix anything. He would die for her, but he doesn't dare. 

They're all watching her. Waiting for their lady to tell them where to go. 

"Tarvek," she finally says, and Tarvek clenches his fists. "How many times have you gone back in time now?"

"Twenty-four, my lady," he admits, and fixes his eyes on her to wait for the screaming.

It doesn't come. She gives a sharp nod. "Why do you keep trying?"

"I need you alive and free. I've never found a way to keep Lucrezia out." The words trip over each other on their way out his lips, too eagerly, because he can finally tell someone, he has to tell someone, maybe Agatha can see what he can't. "She takes over your mind - sometimes my father manages to grab you last night after the show," which at least won't happen now, he finally found a silent way out, "sometimes the Ghost Ladies grab you later, sometimes she has me wasped and sometimes I can run away but it's always Lucrezia come conquering and that can't be what's supposed to happen, Agatha, I'm sorry, I'm trying," he's babbling is what he is, "it's not supposed to happen, you and Gilgamesh should get your happy ending." Her eyebrows go up. Right, Gil's not even here yet this try. This eddy. Where they get out clean but it's the _wrong time_ still and what does that say about predestination and free will? "I can't die because then it would be the last try."

The gelatinous creature helpfully puts in, "Oh, you die anyway next eddy."

Of course. If it's inevitable he may as well face it with dignity. 

But Agatha is looking at them, brows furrowed like she's deciding where to make the first cut of a vivisection. "Krosp," she finally says. "I don't suppose you have some secret animal instinct for when someone is lying that you've never bothered to mention to us?"

"What? No!" Krosp's tail is straight up in the air, defensive and angry. "For all I know they're conspiring to get you captured by the Baron! Except - " He's digging his claws in, and Tarvek breathes carefully through the pain. "Except that jellyfish thing really did just show up from nowhere. I'd have heard him sneaking around. He goes _squelch_."

"So would I," Zeetha hisses. She's lowered the two swords but that means nothing, not from so skilled a warrior. "Agatha, I think they're telling the truth."

"Fine." Agatha points dramatically at the gelatinous creature. "I'm not just going to sit and wait for this timeline to end, though. If you don't know how it works maybe you're wrong about it ending, and if you're right maybe we can learn something for the next - eddies. Seneschal," and the title falls unhesitatingly from her lips and Carson von Mekkhan, for all his professed skepticism, stands up straighter, "where were you taking us?"

"You don't go there!" The creature is not only vibrating, it's _flickering_. "The Dreen know! Go to the mirror!"

"_What mirror?_"

"Under the - red building! It will hide you from them, it will be a static point, hurry! The resonator approaches!"

Carson has the expression of a man who resolutely refuses to be disturbed by any of this, no matter how absurd it is. "The Red Cathedral, he probably means," he says. "There's a secret passage not far from here. If you want to pay attention to him, my lady."

"_I want to see this mirror,_" Agatha answers, and there's no arguing with the Spark crackling in her voice, not for any of them.

They hurry. They emerge from a dusty passage carved in bare limestone to a hallway of dressed granite, and then through a doorway and it's there, a glowing green slab framed by stone figures, one standing against a wavy sea, one a starry sky. Tarvek gasps, because he's absolutely certain, for no reason he can name, that he's seen it before. 

No, not slab, his mind only _interprets_ it that way because he's _too used_ to _Euclidean space_, it's a _hole in the wall,_ stretching through a _dimension_ that normally is _completely flat_, and Tarvek shakes his head to keep from falling into a fugue, he can't afford it with Agatha so far gone, holding up her hands to gauge its size and already starting to hum. _Heterodyne._

"This part hurt, but don't worry," their guide says, and Tarvek suddenly knows he's made a terrible mistake. He can't be where he is with that hand reaching for him.

So he isn't anymore, but the hand is still there, grabs his hair, and _shoves_, and the green flash surrounds him before the scream can leave his throat.

\--

This is his last try, he has to -

\- ot sah eh yrt tsal sih si sith-

\--

He stares down at Gilgamesh's corpse with a growing horrible sense that he's seen it before, the puddle of blood where his chest should be, the wide-open eyes. 

Lucrezia screams. It's a convincing scream. 

The memories flatten themselves into Tarvek's mind with the deadly inevitability of a pillow held over his face, and he remembers that he spent the last week sleepwalking through the same mistakes he made the first time, down to giving away the Spark-wasp and getting shot and being saved from Hogfarb's Resplendent Immolation only by Gilgamesh's inexplicable generosity, and at the same time he remembers falling helplessly through the impossible geometry of the gate, a minute before, and there's a fainter memory there, too, of Airman Higgs saying, "So what happens next?"

That one doesn't belong. It didn't happen. He has to keep his wits, pretend the decades he's skipped past did nothing, easy enough when he only has a conviction they existed and no details, scream and cry like the desperate boy he used to be. It's easy enough. Instinct. What happens next is, he convinces Lucrezia he's on her side again, because what's happened already is past all remedy. "No," he gasps, and the words rip out of his throat as if this weren't the second-to-last try. 

Where did that thought come from? What happened before he fell through the gate? 

Steady on. "You don't die," he yells, "we weren't done," and his hands are covered in Gilgamesh's blood. His acting is perfect. Lucrezia clings to him, gasping in mock-horror.   
\--

His memory comes back in detail, over the next ten years, but too late to do any good.

Lucrezia is declared the Lady Heterodyne. Lucrezia orders the Baron to marry her, then sets about taking over Europa with a terrifying efficiency, killing rulers with the Spark and ordering the Sparkless to swear fealty to her. Lucrezia sends secret agents out with her new, tiny wasp engines, into Africa and Asia, readying the ground for her empire to spread. The Geisterdamen start to show themselves openly. Lucrezia actually seems surprised when that drives her human troops into open revolt. 

"They'll see the wisdom of your cause soon enough, my lady," Tarvek lies. He has the formula ready for the aerosol wasp inoculation. He just has to figure out what to disguise it as. 

A week later three Sparks from Ethiopia turn up with a small army and a large weather machine, and the rest is chaos. 

\--

Tarvek never finds out who had the city-killer bomb dropped on the Geister city. The Empire's weapons lab was working on something like it, so he likes to imagine Baron Wulfenbach managed a last rebellion. 

The aerosol wasp inoculation has the side effect of a horrible, choking death on anyone already wasped - Tarvek refuses to think of it as _unfortunate_ \- and so it works nicely to kill the Geisterdamen and loyal lab assistants left in the bunkers. If any other captive Sparks got lucky, they had the sense to flee right away. "If you're just going to be enigmatic at me than _go away_, Kjarl," he mutters. 

"You will be very upset."

He's hauling the bodies outside to decompose in peace when the gelatinous creature appears again. 

"I have no intention of dying yet. Do you intend to tell me anything useful?"

"This is - this was the wrong eddy. You only have twenty-six years."

"I have a name, you know," the creature burbles. "It's - " the noise he makes isn't anything a human could reproduce, and he cuts himself off in the middle, with a muttered, "Oh dear, that won't do. Can you - Kjarl? Will that work?"

"You again," Tarvek can't help but hiss.

"Really, this won't happen at all."

Tarvek takes a deep breath, which he'll realize later is a mistake. Coming outside so soon even in his protective gear was a mistake. How careless can he be, not to have a radiation counter in the bunker? "Twenty-six years? What happens then?"

But Kjarl is gone again, just as Tarvek asked. 

\--

He spent fifteen years looking, but even the sea where Londinum used to be was empty, and each time he thought he saw campfires on the horizon they turned out to be lightning-strike set. It makes no sense that Tarvek was the one survivor, but nothing in his life has made sense since - a timeline that no longer exists. Since he met Agatha. Take your pick. 

It's the sickness that drives him back. Too much radiation. At least in his old lab outside what used to be the Geister's city, he can replace his failing blood supply and burn the tumours off his skin, and it will be easy to build his machine again. One last time. He's not going to leave this up to Kjarl, or to chance.

And then he finds Othar Trygvassen, wandering through the dead city admiring the green glow. It's the same green as the device under Mechanicsburg. He never found that one again. Too much rubble for one person to dig through. 

Othar, with his usual luck, has spent the last thirty-seven years on an island in the North Sea and has no idea what happened to the world, and Tarvek -

\- is out of ideas, has learned nothing useful in his century of trying over and over, and - is very, very tired.

"Nothing physical," he finds himself explaining, even as he tunes his gateway back to the same say he used to focus on over and over. Outside Paris this time, where Othar, at ten-thirty in the morning, sat down on a stump to rest before he went into the city. He's spent so long wondering where things went wrong. "But I can project you back to your old self." 

He doesn't mention that it's never worked before. He gives very few instructions at all. Othar is an agent of chaos; that will have to be enough. 

Tarvek is going to die this time, and now he knows exactly when. 

\--


	6. Oct. 12: too large a commitment | Dingbots in SPAAAACE!

#### Oct. 12: It always feels like too large of a commitment | Dingbots in SPAAAACE!

[Because to do it _properly_ I'd have to work out about a century of history, including developing my own theory on what exactly is going on with the Eternal God-Queens.]

"I just have a bad feeling about it." 

"Fine. Fair. Do you have a _better idea_? Because humans can't survive that kind of acceleration."

"I bet a Jäger could."

"Maybe. But if we're using weird Heterodyne creations as explorers I'd just as soon use the self-replicating ones."

Yun pinched the bridge of his nose. It didn't, in fact, help with his headaches, but by the time he'd run the experiment long enough to confident of that the habit was ingrained. "Listen to yourself, doctor. You really want to send a _self-replicating_ clank on a vehicle full of convenient mechanical parts that would make just lovely clank fixings, without which the vehicle will be unable to return or, if it goes for the radio, tell us where it's gotten to?"

"Yes!" Apnic pointed dramatically at midair. "Because with the weight savings we can send twelve more rockets if the first one doesn't work."

"Bold of you to assume we won't just lose all thirteen the same way."

"I repeat: do you have a better idea?"

\--

There were precautions they could take, of course. The radio room would be stocked with replacement fittings and wire, aluminum, and bits of protective casing, ceramic. There was a backup radio transponder on the other end of the ship, nestled between the fuel tanks. But it was as Apnic had pointed out: weight savings trumped just about everything. 

After all, it wasn't like the Little Clanks needed life support systems.

Brother Yun clutched the railing as he leaned forward for a better look. They were welding the framework together, right now, and sparks flew from all corners of the device while the men in goggles and leather aprons yelled questions at each other or yelled for another acetylene tank. Two of them were waving blueprints and yelling at each other for reading the blueprints upside down. If it was still going in five minutes he'd have to go make a ruling. Bringing in the Pan-Eurasian Shipwright's Guild had been a good idea and Yun would defend it as loudly and fervently as necessary, but the culture clashes were getting on his nerves. 

Well, and other things. 

"I still don't see why you're resorting to those subsapient things when you have me," one of the other things proclaimed. "They're not even capable of speech." 

At least Yun wasn't required to argue with the _original_ Castle Heterodyne. "They don't have to be," he explained, again. "They're capable of operating an obscuragraph, and they're capable of curiosity and determining their own mission parameters, and they're close enough to Sparks to make any necessary repairs on the way. Speech isn't on the list." 

"And what blithering idiot wrote the list?" 

"Don't call Doctor Apnic a blithering idiot, you wind-up rubbish heap." The first time he'd snapped and insulted their self-proclaimed helper, he'd spend three seconds expecting it to leap on his and try to gouge out his eyes, irrational though the thought was given the size of its limbs, before it had declared him a half-witted meatbag and gone back to scribbling corrections on the ship plans. It was, Yun could only assume, a matter of showing your self-confidence. "Besides, there's only one of you." 

The Castle didn't answer right away. It stalked back and forth on the railing, turning on one leg at the end with the eerie precision of a creature whose legs had a subroutine. But when it did its volume was little below its usual stridency. "There could be more." 

"What?" 

"I'm not an expert in mental transferal," the castle said, sounding a little abashed to admit it wasn't an expert in anything. "But Zoniax Heterodyne is at least _theoretically_ familiar with duplication procedures. No practical experience, of course." 

"I should hope not. There are laws about that sort of thing." 

"Yes, and I don't see why they care. It used to be if we wanted test subjects we just had to pick a town that hadn't paid tribute in a while." The Castle sounded disturbingly wistful. 

Yun looked down again. The arguing pair had either resolved their disagreement or gone off to the design hall to have it out on chalkboards; he hadn't been paying enough attention to tell. A big ox-eared construct from the Guild was rolling in a massive superstructural arc on a handcart, and a tiny woman was climbing into the awkward angle between support ribs, yelling for someone to pass her the hydronozzle. 

Two hundred years ago, someone might have invented antigravity that kept working once you had left the immediate vicinity of a planet's surface. Two hundred years ago, people were still trying to fly to the moon on winged clank-horses. 

No, they had tried the easy way and failed, and now they were trying with simple, unaltered physics. Except, of course, for their tiny pilots. 

He had figured out what he wanted to say to the Castle, at least; he wasn't sure pointing out it wasn't a Spark in its own right would go over well. "It's not worth the risk," he said. "You're irreplaceable. You think any of those men and women down there - " he waved at the welders - "are doing this for the first time? They've never built a void-ship, nobody has, but we know they can build aeroships because they've been doing it for years. If anyone could copy a mechanical mind correctly on the first try with no backup, it would be a Heterodyne. I'm just not convinced anyone can." 

"Coward," the Castle declared. 

"Project manager. Sorry." He shrugged. "We're still using Heterodyne creations, if that helps." 

"You should be grateful my mistress deigned to aid your sniveling project!"

Yun was just grateful the new Lady Heterodyne understood enough of her mother's work to convince the little - clanks to help them. 

\--

They could use antigravity plates for the initial stage, and that was another weight reduction. The irony that antigravity mechanisms always turned out heavier than what they were trying to lift was one of those things that gave Yun a sneaking suspicion that, if there was a God, he had a nasty sense of humour. 

There were still applications. The Floating Palace of Mischabel. Hovertrains. And if you wanted for some mad reason to move a vehicle _straight up_ as fast as possible, it couldn't be beat. 

Which meant power crystals, which, at the energy densities they were working with, meant getting them grown and carved in Hokkaido and shipped in, slow and careful, on an actual ship, to Sohar. There was no call for Yun to go down himself to supervise the unloading; he wouldn't necessarily trust a random batch of stevedores with them, but there were plenty of competent brothers who could supervise. It was just that, well, Yun was on edge. The sooner he saw the power crystals himself the better he'd feel. 

Which was why he was sitting in a coffee shop waiting for the tide to come in, arguing with Castle Heterodyne again. To start with. "Are you willing to reconsider riding in my bag on the return trip?" 

"This was insult not to be borne!" 

"It's not my fault we hit a sandstorm. Look, will you at least let me take off your arms and clean out the joints? There can't be anything in _there_ that's a family secret." 

"Weshssthtth," the Castle said - another loose bit of sand must have gotten into its voicebox - and jumped up and down hard enough to rattle the plate. Sure enough, more sand came out, dribbling onto the china like the droppings of a very tiny rodent. Not for the first time, Yun sent up silent thanks for waiters who didn't ask inconvenient questions. The Castle began again, "Well. I suppose you count as a minion for purposes of superficial repair work. But if you damage my Mistress's designs I will rain fury and terror and hot sulfur on all your works!" 

"Relax. I'm not aeolocognitive." 

"You talk like one," the Castle muttered. But it didn't try to run away while Yun got out his precision screwdriver set. In fact Yun didn't talk at all for the next ten minutes. He would have to calm his patient, but he doubted the Castle wanted to be calmed. 

But before too long he got the shoulder joints scraped out and regreased - thank whatever inventor had developed disposable napkins, or he would have felt honor-bound to use his capuche - and the Castle spun its arms in tiny circles to test the joints. "Acceptable," it declared. "Although I still don't see why you're doing this in the middle of a desert when this can happen. I'm not the only clank helping build the thing. Your _pilots_ are clanks." 

"It only happened when we took a train and rode in an open wagon, remember? You've gone this far without needing more than a few squirts of grease." His coffee was just about cool enough to drink by now. Objectively there were plenty of blessings in this day. "They call it the Empty Quarter for a reason, you know. Even if the entire project vanishes in an unplanned exothermic reaction, we won't take out a city." 

"Hah! In my day Sparks worked where they pleased and never mind the risks to the surrounding communities. They were grateful to be allowed to serve." 

And that, Yun didn't say, is why I'm glad it's not your day anymore. 

They sauntered to the docks proper with no sense of urgency and arrived just when the ship was due in, seaships not having the option of the same exactness of schedule the Corbettites ran their trains on. It was still two kilometers away, Brother Sumeet informed them, the harbor pilot had gone out already, shouldn't be long now. There, you could just see it. 

In fact, if Yun squinted, he could make out the bulk of the crystals. Some enterprising sailors were already pulling away the tarps, and the midmorning sun was at just the right angle to sparkle through them and cast pink light over the waters. It was - beautiful. 

"I know," Sumeet said, voice thick with the kind of wonder that mostly only twenty-year-olds could manage. It sounded all wrong on a man with grey temples. "Sometimes I wonder why we're bothering, and then you see something like that and you remember all about the power and glory of humanity, don't you?" 

Thoroughgoing cynic that he was, Yun didn't, but he didn't care to burst a friend's bubble. "I'm amazed we got them here in one piece," he said. "Good job keeping the arrival quiet, by the way." 

"Quiet?" 

"Well, with a big component like this sometimes you get gawkers - " 

"Oh, I sent them all to the craneyard!" Sumeet beamed. "There wasn't room on the pier for two hundred people, and for a better view, you know. I didn't know they were going to get the tarps off before they docked." 

It would be rude to slap a friend. Yun took a deep breath and didn't. On his shoulder the Castle shifted, with that funny whirr that made Yun worry that someday a superficial repair wouldn't be enough. "Excellent work," it said. "It's so hard to find a good cheering mob anymore." 

\--

Apnic had been doodling. The page was half filled with circles, from tiny ones barely as large as the head of a pin to one whose interior dark stain suggested a tea mug had been left there, earlier in the morning. Right now it contained an unwound clank, sitting still and silent, which was downright weird for the little clanks. Apnic was poking its casing with a copperpoint stylus, and muttering, "It's not like there's a _definition_. There's the Fujimoto scale, but it's not like the little clanks would sit down and take the test."

"Has anyone tried?" Yun shrugged; he wasn't the engineering genius here, but Doctor Apnic could be startlingly blind to brute-force solutions.

"Not that I know of. If one of the Heterodynes did they didn't pass it on to me. And who knows how accurate the scale would be once you take out the verbal component?" 

"Better than nothing, but not very good. It was designed for _potential_. We're never going to see breakthrough in the little clanks -"

"- because effectively, _if_ they can be considered aeolocognitive, they were built broken through." The stylus went _clink clink_ on the hull plate. "I'd still like to have the results. Just to wave at those fools at the Institute."

"Doctor -"

"I know, I know." Apnic sighed. "But they do have the Spark. You've seen it, right? The way they build each other out of parts that shouldn't mesh?"

Yun considered his next words carefully. "The Spark or the mechanical equivalent," he offered. "Something with the same effect, even if what's happening inside their control gearing doesn't map to what happens in an aeolocognitive brain. You're right, it would be interesting to run a Fujimoto test on them."

"Know any special education teachers?"

It took Yun a few seconds to follow this leap of logic. "Oh, to adapt the test? I don't, but we can find one. Fujimoto might do it herself. Or recommend somebody. I'll write to Todai and the Heterodyne."

"Why her?"

"Permission," Yun pointed out. There were reasons he, and not Apnic, was in charge of the project. For example, he was unlikely to seize vital components in a fit of inspiration. "Legally the little clanks are the Heterodyne's property. We should ask before we start using them for extra experiments. I'm sure she won't _mind_," Yun said, and crossed his fingers. "She said if we blew them up or launched them into the void forever, that was just an inescapable risk of the frontiers of scientific knowledge. And this is non-destructive testing."

"Well, obviously," Apnic said. "You're not allowed to do destructive testing on primary schoolers."

Yun just hoped that was a joke.

\--

The ship looked like a wine bottle. It wasn't the most elegant of similes, but there it was. It gleamed in the sun, brushed aluminum casing reflecting painful bright spots over the launchpad. Yun squinted at the upper scaffolding, stretched out at odd angles like a giant insect leg. He'd _said_ the stridulation pegs were overkill, but Professor Tagaev had been in as aesthetic mood.

Twenty meters of elegant scientific perfection, for the orbital test. If this all worked, they'd redesign for a moon landing. It was amazing what you could fit when you didn't have the weight of life support systems to consider. 

"And then we'll explore Mars," Apnic was saying, staring in rapt fascination while Tagaev scribbled eagerly in her little blue notebook. "And we'll go to the asteroid belt - can you imagine? They could build new ships right there for all the new missions! The moons of Jupiter! The rings of Saturn!"

"The problems of smelting steel in vacuum," Tagaev said, and circled something three times, in big, hasty motions. 

It was easy enough to tune them out; Yun had left some reliable brothers guarding the ignition switch. Instead he focused on the oxygen truck, already reeling back its final hose. Yusuf was bolting the valve cover back on. Yun had checked everything he could. Time to send the pilots on. He left the Sparks to their flight of fancy and headed for the scaffolding stair. 

On the upper platform Castle Heterodyne was pointing at the three tiny clanks in their stern line. "Do your house proud! This is a great - oh. It's you." 

The little clanks spun to salute him. They all had arms - one had six arms - and their carefully anodized coatings were gleaming. Yun swallowed around the lump in his throat. "Is everyone ready?"

"Of course!" Castle Heterodyne said, and the pilots made three whole-body variations on the theme of nodding. 

Yun checked his watch. Time. "Pilots," he said, more because he felt something ought to be said at a historic moment than because he expected them to need it, "we're all counting on you. You know what to do." Fire the engines, run the obscurograph, bring it back to the launch field in three days time. "Take your places, and good luck."

He would have liked it if they had carefully, solemnly marched down the scaffolding. Instead the little clanks took it in leaps and bounds, flipped themselves into the tiny door like acrobats leaping through a ring of fire, and shut it with a ping before Yun could scream at them to be careful. 

He swallowed hard and reached for his radio button. "Clear to retract scaffolding," he announced. "Launch at will."

"Retracting," came Brother Alexander's voice from the control room, and the scaffolding jerked as the vast insect-legs folded back. "We are clear to go." It was hard to tell over the tinny radio speaker, but Yun thought he heard someone yelling for quiet. 

It was all out of his hands now. Yun dropped to his knees and threaded his fingers in the grate. He began to count silently, the thing he always did instead of trying to remember the words of a prayer. 

"Now what happens?" the Castle demanded. 

Yun couldn't help but grin. "Now you hang on and we wait." Eighty-nine, ninety, ninety-one, ninety-two -

The rush of wind wouldn't have knocked over a heavy man, as sleek as they'd made their voidship, but the subsonic hum as the antigravity generators spun up their unaccustomed load went straight to his bones. And there it was, rising straight and true, and then the twenty meters were past and Yun was staring across a void at the other support tower, and the blue desert sky behind. 

He tilted his head back to watch, until somewhere high above there was a burst of orange flame. 

It was nice to know that, for once in the world, something had worked on the first try.

\--


	7. Oct. 13: Niche Crossover/AU Day | hereditary

#### Oct. 13: Niche Crossover/AU Day | hereditary

[Also qualifies as 'I just wanted to write the one dramatic scene' and 'Original characters'. The first seven-eighths of the fic involve one Helen Narbon, in 1978, getting a letter from Nikola Heterodyne asking for her help with a biological experiment. So she packs up her adorable four-year-old clone Beta and takes the next airship. She's just finished setting up when Gilgamesh Wulfenbach himself turns up to ask nosy questions, then volunteers to show her around the Mechanicsburg underground. They're in a part of the caverns that's supposed to be a shortcut back to Castle Heterodyne's secret passages, when Beta wanders down a side passage and finds an old trap control panel ...  
]

Helen cleared her throat. "You're not going to run me out of town, then?" She'd had too many close calls in little Eastern Europan villages to make assumptions about an Eastern Europan university town.

"Well, I suppose I should be angry at you for almost killing my grandfather, but given his history I think we can assume he brought it on himself." Zoniax snorted. The wrinkles around the corners of his eyes crinkled. "Besides, the traditional punishment involves being made the Heterodyne's experimental subject. Mother has all these irritating _morals_ about that. No, sweetiepie," he added, looking down, and gently tugged Beta's hand away from his belt. "Don't touch that. It's not safe."

"It's an _adjustable spanner_," Beta said, voice thick with the boundless contempt only a four-year-old could manage. 

"Yes, but if you touch it I'll smack you." He looked back up at Helen. "Besides, you aren't even done with the experiment. We brought you here for a reason and we've not forgotten it."

"I'm not sticking around for nine months. I have to go terrorize Duluth. I owe them one."

"Two weeks, then?"

"Fair enough." Helen slammed back her glass. It wasn't exactly zinfandel, but the stuff Gkika had called Private Reserve Claret had a kick. She needed it. Children! Can't live with them, can't disassemble them for spare spleens without losing your research grant. Beta was carefully lifting the ratchet screwdriver from Zoniax's belt, and it looked like she'd get it away before he noticed. Maybe she should make Zoniax babysit while she worked. Would serve him right.

It would have been impressive to be known as the person who finally took out the infamous Gilgamesh Wulfenbach, but given that he was a hundred and three, it was only a matter of time. Besides. There was the potential pitchfork problem. Helen had a nice secret lair almost set up in Wyoming and she meant to get back there in one living piece.

\--

The centrifuge was whirling away. Beta was watching it in rapt fascination. She knew better than to stick her fingers in, so Helen left her to it and started preparing the nutrient bath. 

She'd just set it down to solidify when someone knocked on the door.

It was Nikola. She was in street wear, without her usual antistatic labcoat, and her glasses were pushed up on her forehead. Helen looked behind her in case Klio was following, but it appeared Nikola was an only twin today. She grinned and leaned on the doorframe, cattish as ever. "How goes the preparatory work?"

"See for yourself." Helen waved one blue-gloved hand around the lab. It had obviously been a kitchen at some point, with the bread-oven-shaped stone fume hood, but the tables were stainless steel and the equipment state-of-the-art. "I got seven viable eggs ready to go. And you know that's optional and your sister is a masochist, ma'am?" The _ma'am_ just slips out, Helen doesn't usually set store by titles, but this is Castle Heterodyne. "Beta there was pure nucleus transfer."

"You have your theories, we have ours. We don't know mitochondria aren't involved."

"Mitochondria don't have mystical power." Helen rolled her eyes. "But fine, it's your painful and unnecessary medical procedure. Are you sure about freezing the extras? Cloning's messy. You're gonna get maybe one standard human and six horrible mutated monsters with too many teeth. Might as well get them over with, I could build the extra bottles easy enough." 

"One at a time. We're sure." Nikola was inspecting the artificial womb, which Helen was actually pretty proud of - she wasn't going to hang around for this one, so she'd designed an external valve array where the Castle could get at it. God, she wished she had a minion that reliable. Nikola ran her finger down the seamless glass tube, and stopped with it pressed to the Okay light. "You can't tell me that's the only reason Beta's an only child."

Beta piped up, eyes still fixed to the centrifuge, "I'm unique." The little rugrat was listening? 

"You certainly are." Nikola sounded like a fond granny. "I can't wait to see what you do when you break through."

Beta kicked idly and spun her stool around in a circle. "What does break through mean?"

"It's what we call it when someone becomes a Spark. Your first big project."

"What they call in in Europa, kiddo," Helen put in. "In America we just call it _going mad_. No fancy names. Same with Sparks - we don't have Sparks, just mad scientists."

"Oh." Beta frowned. "Am I gonna be a Spark when I grow up?"

"Sure, if you move to Europa." Beta was probably going to have the Europan universities falling all over themselves for her, but there was something so unpleasantly controlled about how they dealt with what they called The Spark here. Helen figured it had to do with reality-blindness. That was one big problem that was about ninety percent American. "Unless you just never break through, like Nikola."

The nutrient bath was bubbling nicely. Helen grabbed the syringe of phospholipid solution and squeezed it in, counted to eight, turned off the magnetic stirrer. It whirred peaceably to a stop.

Nikola hadn't turned around. In the sudden silence she said, still sounding casual and amused, "That's quite an accusation."

"Really." Helen began ticking the points off n her fingers for dramatic effect; even if Nikola wasn't looking, she should teach Beta how to gloat. "You're in charge of the experiment, but we used cells harvested from your sister Klio instead. You're in charge of the experiment, but you flew me over from America to do the actual lab work. In fact pretty much everything you publish is a collaboration." It was unsurprising when she worked with her twin sister the mad architect, what in Europa they called an Art Spark, who might have needed the engineering help. It was more surprising she'd brought in Loren Redimayne for her robotics work. "Anything you did on the development of the mad brain now would just be replicating what I've got going with Beta, and proving someone else's result isn't worth this much trouble. You're Heterodynes, so the results wouldn't scale anyway." She slapped the table. "Conclusion: you're not trying to find out how a mad brain develops. You're trying to find out whether it will."

There should have been a dramatic pause before Nikola conceded the point and ranted about - whatever cunning plan spending fifty years pretending to be Mad was in service of. Instead there was Beta's voice piping in, "Momma? Are the test tubes supposed to glow?"

Oh, right, that silence meant the centrifuge timer had run out.

"Oh crap," Helen said, and there wasn't time to inject the precipitant; she dove for Beta. They went to the floor in a tumble of limbs. Damn, stone floors hurt. But two seconds later, just as Beta was starting to squirm, the test tubes blew and then the floor seemed like an excellent place to be. 

When they picked themselves up the ceiling was striped with pink goo and the tube stoppers had vanished completely. Nikola was rising cautiously from behind a bench she must have made a flying leap to land behind. "You still use Abterin's process?"

"I thought you didn't know biology."

"I've picked up a bit. Castle!" she added in a near-yell, and Helen grimaced. "Non-hazardous spill in here! Send up a cleanup crew when we're done." There was a thud like a sash window dropping shut. 

Helen dusted herself off and gave Beta a once-over. Her face was crumpled up, and one of the DNA-shaped barrettes she'd pitched a tantrum for when they went to the Walton Memorial Museum had slid down her hair and was in danger of falling on the floor, but there was no visible blood. Good. Scrubbing down the lab with bleach would have been all kinds of suspicious but no way was Helen leaving her genetic material around for Heterodynes to find. After a few seconds Beta broke into a gap-toothed grin. "Exothermic reactions are pretty!"

"Yeah, yeah, kiddo. Except the ones that turn you into a pile of soot."

Damn the woman, Nikola was giggling.

Helen crossed her arms and glared. "Just wait until yours is four," she told Nikola. "A whole homicidal castle won't be enough babysitter."

"That's fine. I have a horde of super-strong monsters for backup." Her face was unduly serene. "I'm still a Heterodyne."

"Still, eh?"

"They don't disown you for not having the Spark. Mother would have had anyone who suggested it thrown to the ducks." She looked aside, and tucked her hair behind her ear, and stalked over to the other tall lab stool as if she were perfectly at ease.

Ahah, so you admit it, Helen didn't say, because there were limits to annoying someone in their own lair. Instead she asked, "Are you absolutely certain you and Klio are identical twins? Not just fraternal twins who look alike?"

"Monochorionic." Nikola sighed. "And so we've proven there's an epigenetic factor. Natural experiment. Except - you look like living proof genetics are enough." Her smile twisted. "There have been Helen Narbons for a very long time."

Every one a mad scientist. That was why Helen had been so sure Beta would make a suitable case study. "Maybe we've been lucky."

"Maybe." Nikola folded her hands together. "I'm not a Spark, but I have - a knack with Sparkwork. I can follow Spark's notes. Look at aeolic gearing without getting a headache. Sometimes even reverse-engineer it. Zoniax says, and I quote, if we can get that on command it'll be more useful than a dozen ordinary Sparks. I think he's overselling it." She chuckled. "But it's an interesting question, don't you think? Why I can get so close to the Spark without getting burned?"

That was just about the most flowery possible way to say it, but dammit, it was a good question. Very good. Helen would have to come back and ask nosy questions once they got a viable infant out of the deal. 

"Mommy? I found a robot!" Beta announced, from under the table. "It's little and it's red and it has eyes on a stalk!"

Nikola sighed, and leaned down to look under the table. "That's one of my mother's," she announced. "Give it here. We're never going to find all the damn things."

\--


	8. Oct. 14th: not good enough | a matter of trust

#### Oct. 14: Every time I've tried to write it, I feel like it's not good enough | a matter of trust

[Set in the 'In which Gil and Tarvek work some things out' verse, sometime after 'precommitment' and 'against their better judgment'.]

"How do you feel?"

Tarvek contemplated this question. "Floaty" was accurate, but didn't seem quite to the point. They were watching him, waiting for him to say something, anything, and that should have put him on edge or at least made him want to lie to get the examination over with, but right now he only wanted to give them an honest answer. Which was the point of this exercise, wasn't it? Agatha had noticed Tarvek hiding again. She didn't like that. She left the truth potion on his bed and didn't say anything about it, left it entirely up to Tarvek whether to use it. But he belonged to Agatha; lying to her shouldn't be an option. "Safe," he finally said.

Gilgamesh had picked up the half-empty vial, cradling it in both hands. "Do you want me to take some too?"

He'd done it last time and it had been such a tremendous relief, but hearing that he trusted Tarvek once had been enough. Tarvek shook his head. "That's not the point."

"What is the point, then?" Gilgamesh looked more amused than upset. Tarvek could only tell how upset he was by the clenched fists. 

And that was the problem, he didn't want Gil to be afraid but it was all wrapped up with the awful things lurking in his head that were hard to put into words, even with the potion making sure he couldn't feel terrified or want to hide. He blinked helplessly. "I'm going to mess this up somehow," he said, which was the least of it but the easiest to articulate. "I don't know how, it won't be on purpose, but you - both of you are good people. All I am is loyal."

They didn't say anything. Agatha's hand went tight on his shoulder. 

"I mean, I'm loyal to _Agatha_." He was leaning over toward her, because it felt safe, and nothing was going wrong right now and right now that was the only thing that mattered. Agatha's hand slipped into his hair, and he would have purred if he'd been physiologically capable of it. "I would never do anything I thought would hurt her. It's no good worrying about it. I'll never know what I did wrong until you exile me for it."

"But you're worrying anyway, aren't you." Agatha sighed. 

"Of course. It's my job to worry about everything. I can't turn it off for the inevitable." Agatha didn't answer that, and so he fell silent. He'd used a three-quarter dose, in an attempt to keep his dignity and spare them having to interrupt, so he could do that. There was nothing pressing to do; Agatha's fireplace cast a warm glow on the bone-patterned rug and Gilgamesh was leaning back in the armchair like a man at peace with the universe. 

Eventually Agatha said, "I thought when I left you the potion that you'd barricade yourself in your room for an evening reading penny sparklies, not come confess to us again. I should have left a note." 

There was enough annoyance in her voice that even through the euphoric haze Tarvek felt a pang of guilt. "I don't want to lie to you, though," he offered up, a weak attempt at self-defense. "And I will if it's an option. Not even on purpose. It's not like that for Gil. He's only a weasel when he wants to be."

"Good to know you have so high an opinion of me," Gil drawled. 

Tarvek snorted. "I know you. You are somehow, despite the odds, a genuinely good person."

"Huh?"

"No, really. You want the best for people and you have principles. Which you take seriously. I mean, they're stupid principles, but you stick with them. You won't use mind control even when it's for people's own good." There's a look of disturbed horror on Gil's face, which probably ought to feel more relevant than it does. "And you try not to hurt people who aren't causing trouble. Sometimes you do anyway, but you try. That means a lot."

"That's very, very basic morality," Gilgamesh answered. "But I suppose it's a good sign that you admire it. I don't suppose you're going to try it? Because there's no cult initiation for moral principles. You just decide to follow them and ta-da! You're a good person." He illustrated with a little explosion-gesture. 

"If I decided that I'd be betraying Agatha, though." Tarvek closed his eyes and focused on the way her hand went still in his hair. "She needs an evil chancellor."

For some reason that made Agatha give a tiny splorfle of a laugh, and even in the warm haze of the truth potion it sent a shiver of delight through him, that he could make her laugh. "Isn't that what Hadrian Greenclaw is for?"

"He's loyal to the Heterodyne," Tarvek said. "I'm loyal to _you_." There's something in there about Mechanicsburg versus The World as well, and he would try to articulate it if he were sober, but it wasn't the most important thing.

Somewhere over his head Gil said, "Greenclaw? The businessman? Is there something you're not telling me?"

"Nothing the Baron should know," Agatha answered. "Shush. We're here for Tarvek right now."

"He's starting to make me nervous."

"That's my job," Tarvek protested. 

"Nervous for you."

"Oh." Tarvek blinked, trying to fit this into his mind. He'd only been telling the truth. 

Nobody spoke after that for a while. Tarvek watched the flickering fire and relaxed against Agatha's warmth. He might as well enjoy the hour before his senses returned and the full knowledge of how stupid he'd been, to admit to anything shaped like fear in front of the two people he'd burn down the world to protect, slammed into his mind and left him shaking with guilt.

When the silence finally broke it was Agatha's voice, soft and low and as unyielding as a steel beam. "Tarvek, you know there are a lot of people I care about, right? Hadrian, Vanamonde, Adam and Lilith, the entire Jägercorps ... "

"Violetta," he added, following the prompt like a cat chasing string. Wouldn't Krosp laugh to see him like this. "Krosp. Von Zinzer. Mezzasalma and Mittelmind. Gilgamesh."

"So glad I made the list," Gilgamesh drawled.

"Hush. My point is, I'd be upset if anyone I cared about was hurt. You know that. Just remember that while you're doing your cold calculations. If you don't want to hurt me, you don't want to hurt _any_ of them."

Tarvek closed his eyes. "I know."

"Including you."

He blinked. "You really shouldn't."

"But I do. So I'm not going to get rid of you. You're _mine_. And maybe there's something you could do that's so terrible I'd kick you out, but it's a _lot_ more likely that if you, oh, tried to blow up the Castle or have Gil assassinated or reroute the Dyne to power your experimental sewing clank, I might lock you in a tower, but I wouldn't make you go away. I want you here. Understand?"

"That's- " Gilgamesh sounded like he was biting back an intemperate remark. "Not very helpful."

"It is, though," Tarvek put in. It made him feel warm and safe and loved, that he'd still have a place with Agatha even if that place was in her dungeons. "Comforting."

Gil snorted. "And that is why I worry about you."

"Why? I can take care of myself. Probably better than you."

"Hey!"

"Oh, come on." He couldn't have stopped himself, which was the point of the truth serum anyway. "You don't know when to stop and you don't know how to delegate and if one of us isn't in the room you barely know how to fall asleep. Remember the time you went to Geneva? And how Admiral Dupree dropped you off unconscious in the courtyard afterwards? Well, obviously you don't remember that bit, you were unconscious." Maybe he was gloating a little. Maybe he should have taken a full dose.

"I thought we were doing this to talk about you." He could just about make out Gil's furious blush.

Somewhere overhead Agatha sighed. What was she doing all the way up there? Oh, right, he'd toppled into her lap. "If you can worry about him he can worry about you," she proposed, sounding calm and unconcerned. "Somebody should."

"And you don't?" Gilgamesh crossed his arms and sat back in the armchair, knees stiff and scowling. The firelight brought out the gold in his skin. If some sculptor had given up virtues for moods, he could have modeled for Annoyance. 

But Agatha was serenely unconcerned. "Would it help?"

Gilgamesh's mouth opened and he held up an angry finger. Then it dropped. "No," he offered, uncharacteristically meek. "It's just - going to take a while. I'm not used to ..."

He shouldn't look like that, all shy and crumpled up, and as comfortable as it was to lie with his head in Agatha's lap Tarvek couldn't stand to watch it. He sat up until he could reach out and lay a hand on Gil's knee. "Being alone?"

"When it's not because you got kidnapped or stuck in a bubble of frozen time or faked your own death." That last with a rueful glance at Agatha. Tarvek gave him a reassuring pat. "I keep thinking I should be going after you, not just - sitting at home reading reports and dispatching repair crews and fiddling with my flying machine. Don't you ever get like that?"

"No," Tarvek admitted. "I can't save you from yourself and you don't need the help with anything else. Almost anything," he corrected, because the urge to be precise was very strong under this kind of influence. 

Gil ran a hand through his hair. It didn't leave it much more of a mess. His face had gone red, and he looked away as he muttered, "It's not like I have any reason to worry."

"Apart from all the tines we _have_ been in trouble?" Agatha burst out, throwing her hands in the air. Despair at their stupidity. "You're not the one who's being - You know what? Come here, both of you." She spread out her arms.

Even Gilgamesh wasn't so stubborn as to ignore that invitation, and they practically tripped over each other throwing themselves into her arms. Tarvek pressed his face to her neck and took deep breaths. It felt so nice to have her arm around his shoulders. And Gil's arm around his waist, clutching at his waistcoat almost hard enough to rip it, never mind wrinkle. Spending time with Gilgamesh had left him resigned to wrinkles. And stretched-out seams, because the man seemed to think that because they were the same height meant they took the same size in shirts, but it was endearing in its idiotic way. Right now Tarvek couldn't have minded anything, anyway. 

He could comfortably have stayed just like this until - well, until the truth serum wore off, at least. But eventually, Agatha loosened her grip a little, just enough for them to sit up and look her in the face if they wanted to. "You two should talk to each other more," she declared. 

Tarvek didn't pull back, even though it made his words come out muffled. "About what? It's not like we don't have our noses in each others' business. I didn't tell him about that business with the Duchess d'Courcey," he added, and he shoudn't have said that, that was the problem with truth serums, but he couldn't have stopped himself. "But he was so busy I didn't want to worry him, and it was family business anyway. I didn't even have to kill anyone. It's so nice living in Castle Heterodyne." He nodded. Yes. The Castle could be annoying, but he'd never felt safer. 

Gilgamesh sounded like he was choking on sonething as he answered, "_What_ thing with the Duke?"

"She was just sending a Smoke Knight to try hypnotic suggestion on me. But the Castle caught him before he could do anything and she still swore fealty, so it wasn't important. We let the Smoke Knight go," he babbled on. "He was a wreck."

"I shouldn't let you leave Mechanicsburg," Gil muttered, but Tarvek could feel him relax. 

"I can look after myself, Gilgamesh," Tarvek said, into Agatha's shoulder. She was rubbing little circles over his spine, but not speaking. Letting them take it in their own time. Tarvek loved her so much. "Don't you trust me? You've let me do all sorts of -"

Gil blurted out, "I trust you!"

Despite everything, it wasn't the answer Tarvek had been expecting. Not with Gil's mind undampened by truth serum and unlifted by the aftereffects of thorough lovemaking. Tarvek couldn't help but lift his head to look at his -

Husband? They'd never gotten around to the ceremony, as much as the thought made Tarvek's heart rate increase. Friend? True, but incomplete. And however adrift they'd be without Agatha to keep them steady - 

"Go on," Agatha said. "Say it."

Partner, Tarvek thinks. In a common enterprise. Define it later. 

The lines of Gilgamesh's throat stretched out as he swallowed, and shook his head. "Not now. I don't - this shouldn't involve mind-altering chemicals."

That got a derisive snort. "Nothing else is working," Agatha declared. "Really. You need to _talk._ I'm tired of watching you dance around each other and not admit anything. Wait until you're sober if you like, but please, _talk_."

Right now Tarvek felt like he would agree to anything. Not that it's that different from how he usually feels around Agatha. She's his goddess, however much she'd roll her eyes at the term. But now wasn't the time, so he pressed his hand against the warm skin of Gil's ribs, and turned beseeching eyes on Agatha, and hoped it was enough.

"But right now," Agatha went on, "I think we should all go to bed and sleep."

"You mean - " Gil broke off suddenly, and then his hand was pressed to Tarvek's neck, like he was checking for the fast pulse of a lie. Ridiculous. "Will you be okay? I know you don't like to sleep with us - Can you tell me why?" 

And it's ridiculous how delicate the question was, but the answer spills out anyway. "You wake me up if you move. And I get nightmares anyway. I don't want to wake you up. You don't sleep enough," he babbles on, and he'll regret this in the morning. "I can't make you lose any more-"

"Tarvek," Gil's voice interrupted, patient and certain, "I'm used to it."

Tarvek blinked. "Oh."

"I know some mental techniques. It's fine. Wake me up if you have to."

This was just surprising enough that it left Tarvek blinking, not sure how to reply. But he was safe, in Castle Heterodyne, in the arms of the two people he loved more than life, and he was in the grips of a three-quarters dose and nothing could possibly go wrong and maybe if he got to sleep before it wore off nothing would go wrong all night. "Okay," he mumbled, and closed his eyes.

\--


End file.
